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“GUITARS AREN’T MADE BY SOME DUDE ON
A MOUNTAIN TOP, A GIFT FROM THE HEAVENS
THAT ONLY A CHOSEN FEW COULD CREATE –
We have a bunch of them here. My dad got into IT’S WOOD, METAL AND STRINGS, YOU KNOW?
restoring them and then got into making cabinets
and furniture, which evolved into his first shop.” ALMOST ANYBODY CAN LEARN TO DO IT.
When Doug Kauer was five, his father left his IT’S NOT SOME MYTHICAL ART”
day job to set up his own full-time cabinetry shop.
The family business paved the way for a lifetime of
learning for junior. “The running joke has always been
that child-labour laws only apply to everybody else’s says Kauer. “Then, in about 2000, my dad’s cabinet ABOVE Scott Holiday with
kids,” says Kauer, with a laugh. “I got stuck working at shop became the first in the Sacramento area to ‘Excalibur’, one of several
the shop my whole life.” Little did he know, of course, have a CNC machine. This really nice piece of maple Kauer Banshee models in his
that such work would eventually become his life. came into the shop – my dad had ordered a bunch to enviable guitar collection
As his formal education progressed outside the make crown moulding or whatever he was doing. Dad FACING PAGE Doug Kauer’s
shop, Kauer eventually began working to complete played guitar too. I’d made a lot of furniture over the own 12-string Super Chief has
his teaching credentials, and still bears a love for the years as a kind of side income, and I saw that piece of TV Jones Super’Tron pickups
classroom. Even his experiences in the California maple and thought, ‘You know, I kind of want to build
state school system, though, seemed to be steering myself a guitar’.
him back to the wood shop. “At the time, I didn’t know there was a boutique
“I took CAD [computer-aided design] in my senior industry,” he continues. “I played guitar and had always
year of high school because it counted as a math class,” tinkered with mine but I had this weird epiphany:
GUITAR MAGAZINE 119
