“IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT JOB THEY
HAVE, THERE ARE REALLY GOOD
PLAYERS HERE. THEY’RE SO PROUD
TO BE WORKING ON FENDERS –
AND I’M RIGHT THERE WITH THEM”
of his first year with the Custom Shop, Ron Thorn
simply says: “It’s amazing! And just the sheer
comradery – most guys here play guitar, so they’re
just nerded out. It doesn’t matter what job they have,
they can be sanders, fret installers, there are some
really good players here and they’re so proud to be
working on Fenders. And I’m right there with them.
It’s a great product, and everybody’s thrilled by it.”
It was a long road to get there, though, and the
trek began north of the border. Born in Brampton,
Ontario, Canada – “in the summer of ’69, the week
before Woodstock” – the young Thorn was immersed
in both music and woodworking practically before
he could walk. “My brother is 10 years older,” he tells
us, “so all throughout the 70s, say, I’m six and he’s
16, so you can imagine the musical influences he was
bombarding me with: Zeppelin, Rush, Max Webster,
Queen. I was just hit with all the good music at an
early age, which certainly helped shape my future.”
Thorn’s grandfather and two of his uncles were
finish carpenters by trade and his father, an armourer
for the Royal Canadian Navy, was skilled enough
in the craft to maintain a comprehensive wood
shop in the garage of the family home, in which he
constructed all of the furniture in the house.As Thorn puts it: “I didn’t realise that wasn’t the
norm until taking woods and metals in junior high.
I went in there knowing how to operate every piece
of machinery and my friends are just on the brink
of cutting their thumbs off. I didn’t realise that, ‘Oh,
you all don’t have wood shops in your garage?
That’s peculiar!’”
In 1979, Thorn senior accepted a new job in
Burbank, California and took the family with him,
and it was there on the West Coast where the
revolution in electric-guitar design had first been
televised three decades before that junior really
started putting the wood, the metal and the music
together. At the age of 13, a friend from junior high
gave him the neck and tuners from an imported
Japanese Prestige model guitar from the 60s and
within a week, he and his dad had built a body and
he had fabricated a pickguard and a string-through
bridge in metals class. The electronics, though, would
have to be sourced elsewhere.DO YOU WANT TO SOUND LIKE HIM?
“This was 1982,” says Thorn, “and Van Halen’s at
their peak. And I specifically recall walking to Killeen
Music in Burbank, where I told the guy: ‘I need a
pickup.’ He asked what kind of guitar it was for, and I
told him it was home-made, so it didn’t really matter.
And he points to the picture of Eddie Van Halen
on my ’81 tour jersey and says: ‘Do you want to
sound like him?’ as he slides the Duncan humbucker
across the counter top. I was just like [affects a meek
‘caught-out’ voice], ‘Yeeeesssss...’ I grabbed it and my
feet never touched the ground on the way home, to
get that thing whacked in there and wired up.”
And so it began. Thorn worked his way up from
that first DIY job to modifying the Ibanezes and
other guitars popular with kids back in the day, and
quickly became the go-to guy in high school for
repairs, modifications, installations of locking Floyd
Rose and Kahler vibratos, and the rest of it. “Lots of
humbuckers slammed into Strats,” he recalls. “That
whole routine.”
After studying mechanical engineering, he took a
job as engineering manager for a custom machinery
company in Southern California, where he learned
how to program and operate CNC machine tools.
Meanwhile, in the evenings, he was building guitars
at home in his dad’s shop. And this was when the
desire took hold to add a little more artistry to craft.THE INLAY GUY
“I wanted to take it a little further and do some inlay
work,” Thorn says, “and I built this neck-through
guitar and decided I wanted to do a Chinese dragon
inlay on it. So I bought all the supplies and stuff from
Stew-Mac, and bought some sterling silver from the
jewellery district in LA, and every day after work
would just spend a few hours hand-cutting these
scales and inlaying this dragon. It took months andABOVE The headstock of
the exquisite Ron Thorn
Masterbuilt Thinline
Telecaster featured on p80
OPPOSITE Ron Thorn’s
signature is a
ŋÝŸl·ŕğƇĩĈƼōĈžƇ
Custom Shop quality
SHOP TALK
84