Lean guitar-making

I'm probably late hearing this, but I just listened to the Alton Brown Cast where he interviewed Bob Taylor from Taylor Guitars.  They talk about quite a lot, including sustainability, and lean manufacturing for guitars.  Bob talks about when they started building guitars, they would try to build a batch of 10 guitars to optimize for setup time, but would usually come in much later than planned, with only 5 guitars finished.

So they visited a luthier who had maybe 10 guitars going at once, but at different stages, so that instead of finishing 10 guitars every 10 days, he got one guitar done every day.  This meant he had to do more setups, but repeating the setup so often actually let him get really good at the setup job.

The thing I really like about Taylor's approach, is that it's lean without having to call it lean, they're doing the right things and just getting things done.  That's the best way to do it.

It's a great listen, especially if you're a fan of Alton Brown, like me.

Alton Brown Cast