Suhr Guitars: Factory Visit!
Published on 23 May 2025
If you are going to build beautiful guitars, locating yourself in the wonder and splendour of Lake Elsinore, CA is not a bad idea. Since 1997, this is where John Suhr and his team of artisans, technicians and guitar fanatics have been based, creating some of the most consistently great electric guitars that we at guitarguitar have ever had our hands, eyes and ears on.
With such lush surroundings to take in, you can imagine how difficult it was for three of our team to agree to an offer of factory visit and a chance to pick out some timbers!
A tough day at the office, for sure!
Contents
The Trip and The Mission
Lake Elsinore lies a little South East of greater Los Angeles, nestled behind the Santa Ana mountains and next to the freshwater lake itself. Compared to the sprawling bustle of LA, it’s a quiet lakeside town, idyllic and peaceful.
Our team were headed there for a few reasons. One was to take the factory tour and check out the various areas and stages of workshop, building and finishing for every Suhr guitar. Another reason was to talk to the company about some very special new instruments which I’ll share news with you about somewhere down the line (its worth the wait!) and lastly, our guys were there to pick out some very specific pieces of timber.
The Suhr Factory
With only one day to spend at the Suhr premises, the team took only a brief gallop through the factory. The wood areas (important for later), the CNC section, the spray booths, the final assembly area…every part of the space is used by busy, industrious artisans, all collaborating to make exceptional guitars.
I say guitars, but there’s more to Suhr than just amazing guitars. For one thing, there’s Brooklyn, the fierce watchdog..
Here’s an interesting detail for you: John Suhr himself still keeps a bench ready and waiting to go in amongst it all on the workfloor! Whilst he tends to occupy himself mostly with R&D and amp designing/testing, he is still known to get involved in the building process, so who knows, perhaps the Suhr you end up owning will have been worked on by John Suhr himself?!
Picking Timbers
Woods maketh the guitar. Well, they play an important part at any rate, and the demand for visually stunning timbers has never been greater. The choosing of woods was high on the agenda for this trip.
Interestingly, the trip wasn’t actually about spec’ing any custom guitars! Well, not specifically: that will happen soon, but at the moment, all that has been chosen are the timbers!
Let me explain…
The way things work at Suhr is that bodies and necks are created entirely independently. They are then selected and placed together to make an instrument, but they are not made to be specific to each other. This is a pretty interesting way of doing things, and allows for lots of leverage in terms of creating new options and combinations.
For us, we were concerned with three main areas in terms of body woods: quilts, flames and ‘weird stuff’. When we say weird, we mean ‘incredible’, like this awesome chunk of maple that is both flamed AND spalted! How often do you see this? Never!
When choosing woods, the team began with the top blanks: wonderful sheets of highly figured wood to be used as decorative tops on guitar bodies.
Sometimes, there would be sufficient wood available on a blank to offer a matching headstock veneer in addition to the body’s top. Please note that the chalk outlines shown on all of these pictures are merely suggestions: we may well choose an entirely different body shape for the final build of any of these sumptuous woods.
In the end, we selected 20 tops for brand new custom Suhrs. The raw ingredients have been earmarked for our use - and how wonderful these woods are! - so now it’s a matter of deciding how to shape these fine materials.
I can’t promise anything - and our purchasers are a passionate lot filled with great ideas - but get in touch via the social channels if you have any novel ideas for a custom Suhr guitar: you never know, we might take some of your ideas on board!
Finishes
Now, I can’t say too much right now about finishes, because there is some fun stuff happening behind the scenes right now, but I can say a little about the body rack at least.
Remember I mentioned about how the bodies and necks are produced separately, without necessarily being planned for any specific combination? Well, once the bodies have been made - to the specs of dealers like us who put in orders - they are partially packaged and put on shelves within the ‘body rack’, a large set of narrow shelved filled with shaped, sanded, sprayed and lacquered bodies.
Our guys were able to pull these bodies out from the body rack to inspect colours, as inspirations for our own orders. This way, we could see how colours looked on top of timber, rather than from a colour swatch or an open paint tin. Here are a few select ‘pulls’ from the body rack, which helped inform our decision-making process.
And with that, our team was done! A successful day’s learning, checking and choosing was complete, and our tired team could finally take themselves quietly to bed, with no detours along the way.
Yeah right.
A Waiting Game
This trip to California was merely the beginning of an epic journey, one that won’t be fully complete until well into next year. Once we decide what we want to do with these spectacular timbers (and do hit us up with your ideas because we’re always interested in hearing fresh ideas!), we’ll have to wait just like everyone else for these guitars to be made! It’s all about anticipation and pleasure-delay here, but the guitars are so worth the wait!
We’ll check in again with these Suhr guitars once the order is in and see what’s going to be coming our way!
In the meantime, hit the button below to browse the Suhr masterpieces we’ve already waited for and received!
Click to View our Suhr Guitars, Amplifiers & Pedals
