Plant
owned factory
New Hartford, CT, USA[1]. Built for 2 brands on record.
Ovation plant from 1966; also built Hamer (1997-2013) and Guild (2009-2014). Closed Jun 2014 by Fender; reopened by DW Oct 2015; GEWA 2021-. Geolocated 2026-10-15: 37 Greenwoods Road, New Hartford (EPA Superfund site record); Nominatim building match; claim C426.
More: every plant in the USA, the Ovation lineage, the Guild lineage.
The point marks New Hartford, CT, USA at city level. It shows the town, not the factory gate. Recorded place[1]. Lines run in from where its materials come from (listed below). Each origin is the centre of the region or country on record, not a mill or a forest.
Every headstock this plant has built for, on record. A contract plant can sit behind several brands at once.
The operator is not always the brand owner. Follow a company to see every plant it ran.
| Years | Operator | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1966–2008 | Kaman Corporation / Kaman Music Corporation | secondary[2] |
| 2008–2014 | Fender Musical Instruments Corporation | secondary[2] |
| 2015–2020 | Drum Workshop, Inc. (DW) | community[4] |
| 2021–now | GEWA music GmbH | secondary[7, 5] |
| Years | Brand | Line | Role | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1966–2014 | Ovation | Ovation USA (New Hartford) | full build | secondary[2, 3] |
| 2009–2014 | Guild | Guild USA | full build | community[6] |
| 2015–now | Ovation | Ovation USA (New Hartford) | full build | community[4, 5] |
The plant stays the same across these rows; the company behind the name does not.
| Years | Line | Owner | Parent |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1966–2008[8, 9, 10, 11, 2, 3] | Ovation USA (New Hartford) | Kaman Corporation / Kaman Music Corporation | — |
| 2008–2014[12, 13, 14, 9, 15, 16, 17, 2, 3] | Ovation USA (New Hartford) | Fender Musical Instruments Corporation | — |
| 2009–2014[18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, ] |
What reaches the plant, in what form, from where, and who supplied it. A plant building for several brands draws on the same supply for all of them.
| Material | Form | From | Supplier | Customs | Years | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lyrachord (fiberglass composite)Added 2026-10-15 (llm:claude-sonnet-5-5). CompositesWorld describes Ovation bowls from Hexcel E-glass fabric and prepreg with A.P.C.M. epoxy (Plainfield CT), marketed as Lyrachord; autoclave processing from about 2003. The article does not say which processes run at New Hartford. Source S212 (trade press, proposed secondary). | composite | Connecticut (Stamford), USA | Hexcel Corporation | — | undated | unverified[37] |
Every numbered marker on this page points here: the document, its grade and the passages relied on. An era is computed, so it cites the facts it was derived from. A fact marked “no source” has no claim attached yet.
| Guild USA |
| Fender Musical Instruments Corporation |
| — |
| 2015–2020[13, 26, 15, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 4, 5] | Ovation USA (New Hartford) | Drum Workshop, Inc. (DW) | — |
| 2020–now[32, 28, 33, 34, 35, 36, 4, 5] | Ovation USA (New Hartford) | GEWA music GmbH | — |