'Basically, we're woodworkers, and this is where it all starts from', said Norman Holder. He's a partner with Jack Golder and Bob Pearson, in the admirable Shergold guitar making business. A straight forward, no-nonsense sort of bloke, a highly skilled craftsman, and on the quiet, a bit of a genius, and responsible for the invention of a truss rod that has helped, with Jack Golder's experience, to make some of the finest guitar necks in the world.

The 49'er? Jack started off with Jimmy Burns ('at four bob an hour') and rapidly rose to manager there when the original four pick-up Bisons were made. The first forty-nine were completely hand-made, and jack remembers them with justifiable pride......'Custom jobs they were, it was all custom work, every one of them was a work of art - the shaping, the rasping...... the work that went into them, it must have cost a fortune. Well, of course, it did.' Jack had to plane up all the rough cut fingerboard ebony by hand (from 5/16ths to 3/16ths) and he still remembers the blisters. He did the first shaping of the horns, that beautifully vulgar exaggerated cut-away - 'All I could picture was an animal charging down towards me......and all the necks were moulded by hand then, until forty-nine. Forty-nine guitars actually went out, all hand made they were'. The necks were beautifully dovetailed into the bodies, with a smoothed out heal. Problems developed with the gold plating on the fittings - it kept coming off - and the design was changed to a bolt-on neck (taken from the Vista-Sonic) two-pickup job with chrome fittings. Norman, also working at Burns then, prior to his shortlived emigration to the land where they make guitars out of billabong trees, was involved with this model, and still rates it as a really good instrument.

Bob Pearson, originally with Vox, joined forces with Jack and Norman after the collapse of Hayman. He had the interchangeable modular control system idea while working at Hayman, and Jack and Norman were already in business supplying the necks and bodies for the Hayman guitars, so it was a fairly natural conclusion that Bob should bring his electronics flair to the new Shergold enterprise. We asked Bob about his module idea.

'Originally, when I had the idea, I decided to give it the Hayman thing. I've been working with guitars since way back in the early Vox days, and you could never satisfy a guitar player - being a guitar player myself I could understand it - you were always stuck with (the fact that) once the guitar was made, somebody would want another switch to do something else......it was just impossible to keep changing the guitar, it meant cutting it about and that didn't do the guitar (any good). The idea just came one day, drop a module in, we can change the circuits, and there's no end of different modules we can make up and then put on the guitar without actually changing the physical nature of the guitar itself'.

Unfortunately, just as Bob's idea was starting to cause a stir, Hayman 'went broke'.

That's life, I suppose, but the Hayman collapse also lumbered Jack and Norman with a hefty five-figure problem as a result of their involvement supplying the basics of the Hayman guitars, but a simple and heroic stoicism kept them together to get Shergold off the ground - Jack 'We just had to starve ourselves a bit till it got better'. It did and they are now slogging away from dawn to dusk to meet orders for their own guitars (the bulk of them export, so lay off musos Healey [Dennis Healey, British Chancellor at the time - Ed.]).

Jack will enthuse about their necks at the drop of a template, and rightly so. They grace other guitars than Shergold (an old connection still persists! [He means Burns UK - Ed.]) and if many other makers had their way, would grace a lot more. The enthusiasm in the trade for them tends to justify Jack's opinion that, as far as the electric goes, the neck is the most vital part of the making - a thing I agree with along with a many other players. We thought our readers would be interested in the process that evolves a neck from a lump of maple to guitar handle, and I was fascinated as Norman and Jack took us through all the stages on the way to Bob's final fitting up.

The maple for the necks comes into the country at around 18-20 per cent moisture content, and is kiln dried down to 10 per cent by the importers. When it arrives at the Shergold factory, Norman stacks it and leaves it entirely alone for a minimum of six months - he's absolutely rigid about this rule since a customer pushed him into using some too early, and ended up with a slight bit of movement in the wood. After this period, the pieces are planed and flattened out. We'll take just one piece from here on, to avoid confusion, although the operations are done in batches to cut setting up times. Our lump is now fitted into a guiding jig, and taken to the spindle moulder - several small blades set into a spinning holder - which still owes Norman a piece of finger. This cuts out the flat of the headstock, and the same machine, with a different cutting tool, takes out the groove for the truss-rod. From there the piece goes to a bandsaw, where it is marked up from a pattern, and cut roughly to shape. The actual width is then cleaned up on a router, one side at a time. The next stage is the drilling out of the machine head holes, truss rod access points and so on. This is done in a jig which has locating templates fitted underneath which relate to a guide pin fitted to the working plate under the drill. So far, all this is Norman's end, and now our lump goes round to Jack.