Tom Ellis
Precision Pearl Inlay
Austin, TX
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| Above: Ellis torch and wire mother-of
pearl peghead overlay for Ellis mandolin |
The major innovation in the art of inlay
came in the late eighties with CNC
machines. Tom Ellis was one of the pioneers,
along with the late Larry Sifel. “I had
been building mandolins,” he recounts,
“but at the time it was hard to make a living
at it, and I had three kids, so I started
looking for another profession.” While
working as a graphic artist and photographer,
he started doing some hand-inlay for
some other builders, while continuing to
build on the side: “I’ve had a long association
with Bill Collings. I’ve always done all
of his inlays, and as he grew, I was doing a
lot more work for him. I got a pantograph
and set up for cutting logos and pearl
inlays. He kept growing, and that’s when I
realized that CNC was getting affordable,
so I took the plunge.” He bought his first
machine, and once he got rolling it didn’t
take long to pick up more customers.
Currently he’s got about five-hundred customers,
mostly luthiers that have been in
business for over twenty years.
He consulted with Larry Sifel before setting
out on his own: “I went with different, more
versatile, less expensive machines. He went
with big multi-head machines that were
custom made for them. I thought I could
do it for less. When I told him I was gonna
go into business against him he said, ‘Wow,
I have a bunch of onesie troublesome customers
I can give you.’” Some of them have
ended up doing extremely well and being
great customers over the long haul.
The ideal CNC job is very different
from the hand-cutting ideal, he says:
“Companies like Taylor are the ideal CNC
clients. They order a certain number of sets
of all their models every month, and have
fairly high volume… or Gibson. Regular
monthly orders are your bread and butter;
that’s very consistent work.”
That doesn’t mean there’s no creativity
involved: “We can take a design from a
customer—they can email a CAD drawing
that we can open in our CAD program, like
the finished image of their logo. We create
the tool path and nest it for the machine
and send it over so we can cut it. Or sometimes
a customer comes and says, ‘I want
this or that but what can you come up
with?’ We don’t do a lot of design anymore,
but my daughter and I are designers, and
we do custom designs for our customers. It’s
not profitable or feasible to do a one-off or
one-time custom job with CNC, but we can
do limited editions or fancy pegheads for a
deluxe model. We will want more than one,
maybe a dozen or so.”
The Tree of Life inlay on the fretboard is
one of the standards of the acoustic guitar
world. “For Tree of Life inlays, we’ll do
one or two at a time,” Ellis says. “Tree of
Life ginger board is about 100 hours of
drawing and programming. The CNC part
is not fast in the beginning. Actually, the
design process is very similar to how hand
cutters design.” He does very little hand
cutting these days, but says there are a few
production jobs that require some hand
cutting after the machine cutting is done:
“That’s always very tricky stuff, so I try to
keep my chops up.”
Ellis started building mandolins again about
4 years ago after a 15-year break, and
his daughter has taken over a lot of what
he used to do with the inlay. “Now,” he
says, “for the inlay biz I mostly keep the
machines running, and sometimes that’s a
full-time job. We have nine CNC machines,
just bought a new one and are getting
another rebuilt. There are always new systems
to learn.”
Routing the cavity for the inlay & cutting abalone.
Gluing up & Mother-of-pearl inlaid fingerboards and headstocks ready for installation.