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80s Heritage Top Carve? Believe it or not?

Capt Brad

Member
Joined
Aug 29, 2016
Messages
129
Anyhow, after a long time of trying to nail it down, I finally spoke with Tim Shaw last year (yes, that Tim Shaw - he's now with Fender). He spoke with Bruce Bolen, who is retired and was head of R&D at the time, and they pooled their collective memories. The normal Norlin top carve machine at that time looked like a phone booth and would carve four tops simultaneously - that was the typical sloped top carve that most non-Norlin lovers have come to hate. He seemed to indicate that because of the machine configuration, it couldn't do the recurve that was typical of the vintage carves - and that's the reason for the Norlin carve. Anyhow, the machine that carved the H80 tops was horizontal, took up more floor space, and only carved two at a time. From what Tim said, it was located in Kalamazoo (I have to guess that the tops were sent to Nashville for assembly, because I've yet to see an H80 with a KZ serial number). Anyhow, after the H80 run was finished, the CNC machine and the carve templates were transferred to Nashville, in preparation for the shut down of the Kalamazoo factory. And the reason for the limited edition status of these metallic red guitars was that they were the first production guitars made with the vintage top carve (i.e., using the H80 templates and the CNC machine that carved the tops).

Just a post from 09 these are not necessarily the view or opinion of the author!
 

Big Al

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 24, 2002
Messages
14,537
They made a completely new body pattern, (shorter and with shallow/wider cutaway), they had to carve a new top pattern to fit. They used a "deep dish" vintage carve pattern. They then carved a new pattern with the dish carve to use when they returned to the original body shape.

It is interesting that these tops, when freshly carved, all have beautifully carved contours that just get obliterated by over sanding. You still see this in the variety of carves today. Those more carefully sanded present quite nice dish tops while the more rigorously sanded examples have most of the dish smoothed away.

It's maddening!
 

guitplayer

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 8, 2008
Messages
2,114
the carve on my 1980 heritage is very steep. a marble will roll around and not roll off.
more prominent than any i have seen.
 
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