Re: PLEK it!
I understand what you're saying, and the Plek certainly is a great piece of equipment and it can produce great results. Perhaps it would have been a bit more forthright of me to disclose that I have actually spoken a bit with Joe Glazier (The US rep for Plek, who has also worked with it's development) about the tool when I was considering getting one of these machines, as well as spent time talking with current owners like Phil Jacoby about different versions, and their benefits and limitations. Though I haven't invested in one yet, the option is not off the table.
So aside from working with and playing a great number of Pleked guitars, I do have a bit of insight in to how they work, and what their benefits and limitations are (plus in my pre-luthier days, I worked for a while as a machinist and used to build systems like this). In favor of the Plek, their capacity for doing consistent, precise work is astounding. In support of it's detractors, it does not fully eliminate room for error, and if the operator is not both knowledgeable and attentive it is capable of delivering quite sub-par results, which may help to explain how it can get a bad rap among those who have played a few poorly Pleked guitars.
On the psychology side, surely you can understand the knee-jerk reaction when a new system enters a market which challenges the legitimacy of traditional ones, especially when it's superior results are based on comparison of the
best results capable of the new system against the
average or lesser results of the old. In all honesty, I would even say that the average results with a Plek are better than the average results of traditional fret work (though that average is certainly quite lowered by the number of techs out there who don't exactly strive for perfection). My point of contention is simply that of the best end results that can be achieved by either system, one is not capable of any greater precision than the other in practical terms. To be nit-picky, I would say that the Plek is capable of delivering slightly more consistent results in average accuracy over the 18" length of a typical board, but hand methods are capable of slightly greater precision within local sections. In practice however, I believe these differences which could favor either side are often negligible.
On the engineering side, when I was working as a machinist for Comau (hand leveling surface bearing plates at the time I believe, after they had been CNC'd
), I recall a time when the management made all the engineers from our department come down to work on the floor for a week in assembling what they had engineered. There has always been frustrations between the machinists who build the tools, and the engineers who design them on paper, and this came after a period where it seemed nearly every part had to be redesigned on the floor when things didn't line up quite as the engineers had intended.
I'm not saying that the engineers weren't absolutely brilliant - they certainly were, and I 'm sure I never could have devised half the mechanisms they designed. What often becomes apparent in these machinist / engineer relationships however, is that neither side alone really has the full picture. Speaking from the machinist's perspective here, often times the engineer's "on paper" approach, even with all the tables of standards and tolerances they work from, will often miss key factors in how parts line up when subjected to real world circumstances, not all of which can ever be entirely factored in by the engineer. Certainly the field has progressed since I left, and more of these variables are constantly being tested for and work their way in to the engineers notebook, but it will never be complete, and there will always be a need for tangible, on-the-spot judgments to be made in final precision work.
This limitation of theory vs practice is all the more important on guitars, where we are working with combinations of wood and metal, subject to a wider range of variables both internally and externally (strings, playing style, environmental care, etc) than most systems demanding high precision are ever asked to endure. It is these factors that the Plek cannot ultimately judge and account for on it's own, and is why it requires the judgement of a skilled knowledgeable operator to ensure the results come out as ideal for an instrument and player.
I will concede that the ideal or near ideal fret dress from a Plek (which most shops who run a Plek are capable of delivering) is probably better than the average work from 80+% of the techs out there. This should be taken not to reflect the potential in precision from traditional methods however, but only that there are a lot of shops who settle for "good enough", and never really develop their methods to a point where they can consistently achieve high precision.
In the end I don't think we are in as much disagreement as it may seem.
