Leo Posch

Leo Posch works in McLouth, Kansas, where a busy repair bench and a small bench of his own builds share the same shop. Years of fixing vintage instruments — the kind of work that teaches a builder exactly why old guitars sound the way they do — sit behind the roughly twenty acoustics he makes in a year. His method is squarely in the pre-war Martin tradition: hot hide glue at every major wood-to-wood joint, with the gluing surfaces hand-planed within minutes of glue-up so they meet glass-smooth and un-oxidized; red (Adirondack) spruce tops and bracing chosen hard and stiff; a thin lacquer finish; and a bone nut and saddle. Posch frames himself as "a strange mixture of retro nerd and high-tech geek," and the spec sheet bears it out — hide glue and hand-planed joints next to stainless-steel frets and a two-way truss rod, on the principle that the best material or technique wins whether it's ancient or modern. Though the foundation is traditional, he enjoys building to a player's wishes, working in soundports, arm bevels, fan frets and custom inlay. The guitars land in roughly the $3–4K range and turn up at dealers like Mass Street Music and Dream Guitars, where his mahogany-and-Adirondack dreadnoughts have a reputation as some of the loudest and sweetest around — and where his standing among players rests as much on his generosity as on the instruments.