STEVE MCCREARY: Now we're inside the acclimating room. Back in the middle, where we just left, it's only air conditioning. Once we get inside here, it's climate controlled, which means moisture and temperature control because we don't want the wood to shrink and well. As you can see, all the wood is stacked with little pieces of particle board between everything so air can circulate around and keep the shop at 49% relative humidity in about 72 degrees which is very nice especially in Texas in the summertime.

Now once we head in here is we've gotten some sides out of the side bender, and he's squeezing it into a mold, and then he will join them with the neck block and the tail block, put a little glue in, join these two halves together, and make what we call the hoop. They're actually the sides, the outside rims of the acoustic guitar. We also have a hot pipe for when he kind of touch up re-bends to make sure the sides fit the exact mold, the shape they're going to go on, and this will stay in the mold the whole time throughout the construction process so the guitar will remain the proper shape once it's being glued up.

Like a lot of guitar guys who are building guitars now, Collings built back in the early '70s, early mid '70s, started kind of doing repair work and tearing apart old guitars from '30s to find out why they sound better than guitars made in the '50s or '60s or '70s, and there's a lot of stuff to it. It's all geometry. It's all -- for us, it's that cliché that there's such attention to detail and paying attention to fitness of every individual part. Since we're a small production company, we can spend more time with each piece of wood as opposed to say a larger production company, so we can individual fitness the top, the back for every guitar ---

PATRICK OGLE: So they sound the same? You know, [INDISCERNIBLE] machine [OVERLAPPING].

STEVE MCCREARY: Very consistent. Everything is a little bit different. Every piece of wood just from a different tree is just going to have a different bits, a different ring to it, a different tone to it, so we have to match the tops with the certain backs and sides. With the electric guitars for example, as I just mentioned, we weighed all the body blanks first so we can match what kind of -- how heavy a maple cap to go on it, so it really is all about wood, and we just have been studying wood for over 30 years and Bill Collings is kind of from a family of engineers and is sort of a born engineer. He just happens to have a machinist's hand and a designer's eye to go along with it so it's a perfect amalgamation of skills to do this, and it's just kind of blood, sweat, and years that we've been doing it for so long that we understand what works together, and building acoustic guitars is a pretty challenging thing, especially to do it consistently. If you build a hundred guitars, there's going to be a kind of a range of guitars in that hundred, but we've always really strove to make all hundred of them sound very similar with kind of a Collings sound without having any dud, dead spots, no duds, no bad guitars basically. Sometimes a piece of wood will do something to you and that will end up going to the dumpster or whatever but as far as the manufacturing process, we're very consistent and people have -- People I don't think have much fear about ordering a Collins guitar from some dealer that they don't get to play first because the quality always comes through, the consistency, which is something that we worked for for a very long time.