Fender’s story begins back in 1946, when its eponymous founder, Leo Fender, decided to put his electronic know-how to musical use, and started making amplifiers and lap steel guitars in his southern California workshop. With the introduction of the Telecaster and Stratocaster electric guitars (in 1951 and 1954, respectively), the world of music was never the same.

Today, Fender still makes many of its guitars in the Golden State at its Corona, California factory southeast of Los Angeles. Although today’s guitar-making process involves advanced machinery to form blocks of wood into a musical masterpiece, every six-stringed creation is also a hand-made piece of art. “We owe to Leo the modular process with lumber,” Fender’s Director of Operations, Mark Kendrick, tells Popular Mechanics. “We continue to hand shape, hand craft the way we’ve always done it.”