Travis Django Wade favors certain woods for guitar-building. His south-side shop is relatively clutter-free because he requires few tools for his custom work. (Photo by Ron Jenkins)
Fort Worth luthier maintains strings to the past
Malcolm Mayhew
Star-Telegram
Any savvy, 21st-century business owner will tell you: If you don’t have a Facebook page, a Twitter account or, the utmost prerequisite for running a business these days — a website — you’re dangerously behind the times.
If that philosophy is true, Travis Django Wade is working, quite happily, in the past, as the 32-year-old vehemently refuses to adhere to contemporary business models. It’s a business plan that may just fit him, and his old-fashioned profession, perfectly.
Wade is a professional luthier, a term coined in the 19th century to describe those who build stringed instruments. He specializes in making guitars — specifically acoustic guitars — from scratch.
His methods echo a time before factories and machines took the place of bare hands. From square one to the final product, he meticulously hand-crafts every piece of a guitar, poring over drafts and notes, sanding, carving, cutting the wood and, finally, stringing and polishing.
Because his company, Texas String Works, is a one-man operation, each guitar takes quite a bit of time to finish.
“Up to a year. That’s usually what I tell people,” he says, hunched over his desk at his south-side workshop, located inside the recently refurbished Supreme Golf Warehouse. “It’s a time-consuming process. I just don’t have time to start a Facebook page.”
For this level of meticulous craftsmanship, his guitars start at $3,200. (Factory-made guitars, by comparison, usually cost a couple hundred bucks.)
“These are investment guitars — guitars that you will want to hang on to and pass down, not guitars that you want to leave lying around somewhere or play once or twice and forget about,” Wade says.
Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/05/07 ... rylink=cpy
