Recyling?

  You're a bit wary if you have the outgoing/gregarious and reserved/bashful sides of yourself always punching each other in the fuckin' face when it comes time to write - share, blog, whatever... for the dual purposes of marketing and earnestly sharing about what you feel is a God-given thing. Blogging/marketing time is not the time to think,  "Oh, you're just like every guy and girl out there who doesn't think twice about spewing every nuance of their life on to social media as if people actually give a shit or are waiting on the edge of their seats for your next self-indulgent post." 
 Here, now, I wanna blog/market/inform y'all as to why we're recycling guitars. Short answer is expedience, environmental positives and the common sense of these two things when married with what I see is a need in the music-making market and my urge to make/create stuff that's neat, beautiful, full of utility and affordable -without being imported. Can I say...??? Every time some douche bag boutique guitar-maker (shit, or Fender or Taylor or G&L or...) says, "We're excited to offer a new line of affordable guitars", you can bet your ass these fuckin' things' origins are Asia & thus are fouling up our air, oceans and/or ground water from their 'new state of the art facility' in Sukme City, China, South Korea or Indonesia. "Affordable new lines..." are never coming from Jackson, MS or Laramie, WY or Paterson, NJ.  Douche bags.
But I digress...
 I always liked wood and furniture. Having two older brothers who were better at chasing girls and sports than they were at chores, my little brother Gus and I had to do any and all chainsawing and carpentry work needed, no matter how inexperienced and sucky we were at it.   My dad also had me assemble furniture kits early on to 1.) give me a gift and 2.) to get a piece of furniture (hopefully done nicely) on the cheap... killing two birds with one stone he reckoned, I reckon. I enjoyed the task and before university, I took a job at furniture refinisher's shop. I learned finishing and thus my dad's kits (yup, he kept getting them for my brother & I) started turning out to be pretty nice. Fast forward to post-university times...
 I took a job framing houses with a crew of Italian guys from Naples. Guido (I shit you not - that was his name) and his brothers & cousins were really hard workers and not the friendliest folks - at first (brevity keeps me from detailing how working with them and bumping into them over the years, I found out that these guys and their wives were truly friendly and wonderful people). Anywho, at lunch, they would quickly grab scrap pieces of wood and hammer them into sturdy little seats - perfect for chilling just a bit while having a sandwich. Maybe it doesn't take much for me, or maybe it's just the way God made me, but I kinda marveled at this. It wasn't long at all before I was taking those scraps home, cutting them to size, screwing them together instead of nailing them together, sanding the shit out of them and putting a finish on them that was way better then such a piece of scrap furniture deserved. These pieces however, looked presentable ... and could stand up to drunk guys and gals doing stunts on them at parties. 
 This continued on and mostly off over the years. . . and at present, I still have some black walnut, red oak and catalpa wood left over from harvesting trips to PA in 2001 after a wicked storm felled shitloads of trees in Montgomery County. I still harvest/collect when I think I can hide the bounty from my wife. Now I see harvest-able stuff as guitar embryos, and I ain't into abortion of any kind.
 Supposedly short story endless, mass produced guitars made oversees are generally shit* and end up every day on eBay, other on-line market places or in dumpsters. They're basically made as toys for presentation. That many of them actually work, often fairly decently, is more a function of the availability of well-equipped factories and the fact that the most basic lutherie mysteries of the electric guitar have been solved. 
Bill Collins, the late, great founder of Texas' Collins Guitars put it this way, roughly, about imports... "They're made by factory workers. There are so few jobs in the USA for someone who wants to work in the guitar making industry, and the pay is so low that for the most part, all those positions are filled by passionate guitar freaks or passionate woodworkers. The better product comes from here for that reason." Of course he was right, is right. Throw in the lousy (unfair) import/export terms with these importing countries and the way they pollute our world and you have most of my reasons for not buying imports.
Recycle them though. Why not? They're already here, languishing, underplayed, unappreciated (maybe deservedly so)... but they have good bones. True - because their good bones were made with/via the stolen intellectual property of the Orville Gibsons, Leo Fenders and Adolph Rickenbackers of the (American) world.
The missing link then, between great vintage guitars and great, new artisan-made guitars is not the cheap imports (good or not) flooding the internet and the brick and mortar shops still in existence (thank God for them). It is Partscasters, or what I make - Recycled, Tone Deluxed jam-able art (ok, guitars). That's pretty much the 'why' . That and I kinda feel God with me when I do this shit.  
From-the-tree awesome custom guitars are coming ('bout a year and a half away), but there are too many cool, piece-of-shit Asian-ass guitars flitting around...  It's a hoot to fix 'em up, recycle 'em proper-like and get them out in the world, making beautiful music. Please take one out on the dance floor with ya.