Tour the Heritage Guitars Factory – In the Original Gibson Guitars Plant in Kalamazoo [Photos]

During my vacation last week, I made a short trip I've been wanting to make since I moved here to Grand Rapids. I drove down to Kalamazoo and took a tour at the original Gibson guitars factory. When they moved their operations down to Nashville in 1984/1985, some of the employees didn't want to make the change to moving down south, and decided to open up their own company, making guitars in the factory they'd been working in for years.

Heritage Guitars was born in 1985, and they're celebrating their 30th anniversary this year, with some special guitars!

The Gibson plant went from hundreds of employees, churning out 500 guitars a day, to less than 20 working for Heritage, making 5 or 6 guitars a day. They ship to guitar shops all around the world, and have some artists signed to their roster as endorsers. Alex Skolnick of Testament was and endorser for years before recently moving to ESP, but there are many artists like Boz Scaggs, Charlie Daniels, Mark Slaughter, Derek St. Holmes, and more.

The shop being used now is only the bottom floor for the woodworking, and a spray booth upstairs that we couldn't see because of laws about health and safety.

It's not a huge space, but there's enough room for them company to make some really nice guitars. There was a flood years ago, but once that got cleaned up, they continued to crank out high-quality guitars 40 minutes from downtown Grand Rapids.

There were a few people on my tour, some older guys, but also some high school kids, and one student visiting from Japan! That's a pretty cool thing, to have people come visit a factory right here in our area.

If you want to check out some of their guitars, there's a dealer right here in Grand Rapids, on Leonard, called Rainbow Music. Check out the guitars, and then make sure to run down to Kalamazoo and take a tour of the factory, it's free!

Call them to find out when the next tour is, and make the trip, it's a cool old factory, with some nice people working there, 269-385-5721.