Polk’s Plek: a Man and his Machine
An electrical wire is attached to the saddle of a white Fender Stratocaster, creating a slight buzzing noise. The guitar is strapped onto a large grey machine with accordion-folded rubber covering mechanical joints, as the machine’s arm shifts back and forth, slowly hovering over the guitar’s neck. It makes noises similar to a can-opener, with the occasional sound of a single string being plucked.
A computer sits to the left of the machine, where its owner, Larry Polk, stares intently at the monitor, displaying graphs with 21 lines arching and spiking over a grid, representing the frets.
“We’ll fire this baby up and make it talk,” Polk said as he clacks across the keyboard.
The arm moves and makes a low-hum while a round, metal point presses directly against the fret, moving the string aside as it intrudes.
Meet the Plek: an $80,000 German-made machine built for optimizing guitars by adjusting the action — the distance between the strings and the frets.
Polk gazes at the guitar like Frankenstein watching his monster come to life. Essentially, that’s what the machine is doing: making the unplayable playable, or bringing it back to a fuller life.
The machine is housed at Norman Music Center on Gray Street, and is a one-of-a-kind in Oklahoma.
“We’re the only one between Nashville and Los Angeles, if I’m not mistaken,” he said.
Polk said the last time he counted, only 14 shops in the United States carried the machine. Guitar manufacturers like Taylor, Martin, Heritage and Gibson began carrying the machines in recent years, he said.
“They’re starting to use them for production because it’s solved so many of their problems,” Polk said.
It’s a machine which took 21 years of development, he said, and it aspired to make guitars easier to play.
“Well, there’s only one company that makes it; they’re based in Germany. The real goal was to get as low of an action — get the strings down as close to the frets as possible, make it easier to play without any buzzing,” Polk said.
He said it perfects the guitar’s intonation — something humans cannot do without rigorous effort.
“The last process that this does is the hardest part of a fret job and it’s the most painful and hard to do,” Polk said.
“I’ve never met someone who says ‘man, I really enjoy crowning frets,’ I have never heard anyone say that,” he said.
For the technician doing it by hand, Polk said, they work with a file and try to get the fret height correct, then put the crown on it — the metal lines across the neck which separates the frets.
“So they have to file it on one side, and file on the other. Well, doing this all day,” he said while shifting his arm back and forth, “eventually starts to take its toll here,” Polk said, grabbing his wrist and shoulder.
Humans often left the work with errors, he said, whereas the Plek’s accuracy is off the charts.
“It works in thousandths of a millimeter, I think the tolerance of the machine is set at about four thousandths of a millimeter, it’s extremely small, microscopic just about,” Polk said.
He clacks on his keyboard with one finger, then goes back to measuring the frets with a caliper.
“Now, got past the hard part,” he said with a deep exhale.
The machine is performing a complete scan, Polk said, which takes around 5 to 10 minutes.
“The first thing it does is it has to count the frets it goes through, that I count the right amount of frets in there. You have to physically count them,” he said.
“Then it will come up, and as you see what it’s doing right now, it goes to the 12th fret, then it moves over and touches the E string, and we’re passing an electrical current through it right now, through the strings,” Polk said.
A playlist of funk, jazz and classic rock play lightly over the speakers throughout the store as the machine scans the Stratocaster.
Polk bought the machine seven years ago, and charges $175 per use.
“I saw it at a trade show in Anaheim, (CA). They were doing a real expensive Stratocaster — a Fender Strat,” he said.
“I said, ‘hey, I know what it can do for expensive guitars, but what can it do for inexpensive guitars?’ and he said, ‘Man that’s where it really shines,’” Polk said.
They decided to Plek a $40 Chinese-made guitar, he said.
“And it played like a dream,” Polk said with wide-eyes. “It was ridiculous how well the thing played,” he said.
He trained to use the machine for three days in Nashville.
Polk said the machine has no preconceived notions when fixing guitars.
“It doesn’t care if it’s a Taylor, a Martin or a Fender, or a Sunlight out of China; it doesn’t care. It does the same quality work on every one of them,” he said.
“We have people from around the country come in and have their guitars set up on it. It’s saved guitars that people have just become totally frustrated with trying to have fixed,” he said.
Polk said he once had an older customer bring a Martin guitar in to get fixed, who had doubts that the guitar would ever be playable.
“He waited all his life to own this guitar. He had retired and finally had the money for it, and he said ‘you’re my last hope. I’ve had it for two years, I’ve had it all over the state and nobody’s been able to fix it, nobody’s been able to make it play,’” he said.
“The action on it was horrendous — it was the highest action I’ve ever seen on a guitar that wasn’t damaged; it was just unplayable,” Polk said.
He put the machine on the Plek, scoped it out, performed a scan and found out the neck was out of adjustment, he said.
“A guitar’s neck is not perfectly straight. It has to have a little bit of bow in the center,” Polk said.
“When we finished Pleking it, his guitar went from the highest action to what would be considered super low,” he said.
“You could play it as hard as you wanted and not fret-out, it wouldn’t buzz. He was absolutely thrilled,” Polk said.
After a few minutes of playing it and enjoying it, he said, the man became angry.
“And he said, ‘I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at Martin. I’ve had this guitar for two years, I’ve wanted one all my life. And it was unplayable,” Polk said.
He said the man was embarrassed for buying it and not being able to play it.
“That’s like buying a new Corvette and it not going over 70 — it’s not much fun,” Polk said.
Local guitarist Dwight Hamlin of “The Wight Lighters” and “Derek Paul and the Handsome Devils,” said the Plek does wonders to his Telecaster.
“I only have to set it up maybe once every two years … even being on the road all the time,” Hamlin said.
“It makes it longer in between setup jobs. It does something that a human can’t do,” he said.
Hamlin said he’s had fret work done on his guitars before, but would have to maintainance them within a year.
He said the Plek makes his guitars have a better sound and last used the machine about two and a half years ago.
“You’ll see the strings wear grooves in the fret, in the areas where you play a lot, so it goes through and evens out what you’ve done to it, then eventually you have to buy new frets after it gets worn down too far,” Hamlin said.
“The computer reads the heights, and it measures everything perfect,” he said.
The scan is complete, and the Plek stops moving.
“Box stores just don’t have, they don’t want to get dirty,” Polk said.
“Oh, gotta get one more thing,” he murmurs under his breath as he clicks the mouse.
“I just keep doing my thing,” he said. “We’re hoping in the future, people will go back to wanting service and that being an important part of their buying decision, instead of it being an afterthought,” Polk said.