The history of Sorbera Guitars
July 2003 - We were still in high school when our Grandfather passed away and left us with a 30' x 12' work shop he had been using to make anything from pens to beds with. Woodworking was his hobby for many years and if it wasn't for him gifting his shop to us, we would have never started building guitars.
I became familiar with all the tools in the shop and learned basic woodworking skills, however I never attempted to build anything more complex than a simple box.
Here is a photo of how our shop looked when we first started out.
December 2004 - We had been playing acoustic for about 4 years when my brother Daniel became interested in learning how to play the electric guitar. So he set out to find a good electric guitar for himself. Obviously not impressed with the cheap electric guitars which was all we could afford, he researched the kit guitars you can buy and 'put together' yourself. When I saw these kits, I saw how simple the woodworking was and knew I had enough skill to be able to make what we would purchase in the kit.
Off we went with our parents to Alamo Hardwoods in San Antonio, Texas.
This was our first purchase and what I consider to be the start of our building career.
Mahogany back, Bocote fingerboard, Bubinga top, and a Cocobolo neck. We went all out.
This is all, of course... to save money. Looking back, I must say that it would have been much cheaper to just save up and buy an electric guitar.
December 2004 to June 2005 we learned along the way as we built the first guitar, asking questions and experimenting... we finished something that looked like a guitar. Here are a few photos of our very first build.
July 2005 - I decided this was a lost cause and I did not want to 'waste' anymore money... but the day I decided that, more wood suddenly appeared on the front porch. Daniel had ordered more.
The wood he ordered was Wenge & Maple. Little did he know, Wenge is not exactly easy to work with. It is very hard and at the time, our tools could not handle it. We broke many blades in the following months.
We built and re-built that second guitar for almost a full year until we came up with something we liked.
April 2006 - Here are some photos of our second guitar.
After this second electric, we (our parents!) had already put too much money into it to stop. So guess what? More wood. This time we had a better idea of what we needed to do to make a good electric guitar.
The next 5 months was put towards building a Flame Maple & Mahogany electric, this is our Amara model. Everything went smooth on this guitar until the finish stage, we had a friend who owned an automotive painting facility spray our guitar with their clear poly. This turned out to be a disaster when the finish literally boiled off the guitar. We found out later this was due to an extreme case of solvent pop. Stripping it ruined the neck and we had to re-build it and refinish it. Everything turned out OK in the end, this is what it looks like now.
August 2006 - We started on our first commission which was only our 5th guitar we had ever built. This was for Paul Smith. (not Paul Reed Smith, sorry) This build went exceptionally well and by this time we had been upgrading our tools in our shop with high quality machines that would last us a very long time.
February 2007 - Delivery of our first commission. Here is a photo of #5. This is still pre-logo.
April 2007 - We started our first acoustic build. This guitar was a miracle guitar... I say that because technically we did everything wrong, but it still sounds amazing. Here are some photos of what it looked like while we were building it. (Rosewood, Spruce, & Mahogany neck)
After our first acoustic we just kept building more and more, both electric and acoustic. Only selling a few, but always enough to keep us going. All the while buying bigger and better tools to increase our speed of building and quality of products.
January 2009 - We designed and built the prototype Stage Acoustic Guitar. It is built so it can be played through a sound system at very high volumes without feeding back or sounding 'muddy'. The Stage Acoustic does this better than we ever expected.
Here are a few photos of the Stage Acoustic prototype made from Black Limba & Spruce.
April 2009 - We expanded our shop to two separate areas, one for the large equipment where we do all the 'dirty' work. The other where we work (most of the time) on the detailed assembly.
Assembly room
Workshop
I will be updating this regularly from now on, I will also fill in the big gaps in time I left open.
-Chris Sorbera
