Collings Guitars
CJ45T Acoustic Guitar (2025)
2025 · Listed at Elderly Instruments · Lansing, MI
Tracked on Tonewood Atlas — view the full listing at Elderly Instruments’ site.
Photos hot-linked from Elderly Instruments’ site — never rehosted.
Specs
- Top
- Sitka Spruce
- Back / Sides
- Honduran Mahogany
- Neck
- Honduran Mahogany
- Fingerboard
- East Indian Rosewood
- Body shape
- Slope-Shoulder Dread
- Scale length
- 24.9"
- Nut width
- 1 3/4"
- Frets to body
- 14
- Strings
- 6
- Cutaway
- No
- Condition
- New
- Year
- 2025
Collings Guitars
Collings Guitars come out of Austin, Texas — a shop that began on Bill Collings' kitchen table in mid-1970s Houston and grew into one of the most respected names in modern acoustic lutherie. Bill was the kind of builder who would reject a part over a tolerance most players couldn't feel, and that exactness became the Collings signature: a crisp, articulate, precise voice that records beautifully and turns up in studios as often as on stages. Bill died in 2017; the team he trained, led by longtime general manager Steve McCreary, has kept the line right where he set it.
Elderly Instruments
Elderly Instruments has been a Lansing, Michigan institution since 1972 — founder Stan Werbin opened the shop in East Lansing with fifteen used instruments and no cash register, then spent fifty-plus years growing it into one of the largest specialty music retailers in the country while keeping it family-run (Stan still leads; daughter Lillian is the next generation). The store moved to its current home in a renovated old lodge hall in Lansing's Old Town district in 1983 and runs today with about forty employees, many tenured 20+ years. Their catalog is famously broad — Taylor, Martin, Fender, and Yamaha alongside Collings, Bourgeois, Lowden, McPherson, Santa Cruz, Goodall, and Atkin — and the in-house repair shop, a separate 3,000-square-foot space with a spray booth, inspects and sets up nearly every instrument they sell. A specialty music store that's outlasted every shift in retail and stays known for its repair expertise and customer care.
