Our Story.......

Grainger Guitar Parts has been born out of the desire to manufacture high quality, British designed guitar hardware.  Seeing a distinct lack of British manufactured guitar hardware in the market, Darren & Gavin Grainger have decided to put their 20 years plus of precision engineering experience to good use whilst combining their passion for guitars and music which started in their early teenage years.

Darren Grainger, trained as a machinist before moving into engineering design, drafting and 3D Cad modeling, having worked in a precision hydraulics manufacturer for a number of years working up to becoming the technical manager of the company a family tragedy prompted Darren and his wife Gayle to start their own machining company, Hi-Spec Precision Engineering.  Starting small with only a few manual machine tools and working around the clock Hi-Spec has grown to become a large precision machine shop, utilising numerous modern multi-axis CNC turning centres and machining centres as well as some more traditional equipment. The capacity range of the company and services offered are varied and beyond that of many competitors of a similar size.

Gavin Grainger, trained as a fabricator/welder in numerous different processing involving mild steels, stainless steels and aluminium.  Having spent a number of years working for the same precision hydraulics company as Darren, fabricating high pressure actuators and other products produced by the company, he also had time working in motorsport fabricating racing car sub-frames and roll cages as well as time spent working for fabrication sub-contractors.  Gavin began working with Darren in 2008 looking after the companies fabrication requirements.  As Hi-Spec continued to grow Gavin took the opportunity to take control of the rapidly growing CNC milling section, initially looking after two CNC 3 axis machining centres.  Gavin took to the new challenges like a duck to water which allowed Hi-Spec's milling capacity to continue to grow.  The CNC milling section now boasts two 3 axis machines, two 4 axis machines and two 5-axis machines.

That covers the engineering side of things..................both Darren & Gavin began learning electric guitar in their early teenage years..........quickly a love for the instrument and music grew and they played in a few bands together and on their own this carried on for a number of years until around 2012 when Gavin started to look into how electric guitars were made, all of the processes involved in the natural and stained finishes, fret dressing, assembly and set up required to make an electric guitar.....This curiosity lead to purchasing a guitar kit from e-bay and starting the learning curve.....whilst the quality of the parts wasn't fantastic Gavin managed to assemble a reasonable guitar which played well,  Three or four guitar kits later we couldn't help but think that the machines we use every day could be used to make guitar bodies and necks....

After more investigation we started to test cut some strat shaped bodies with good results, we then began looking at our own designs and have since made a handful of commissioned builds and some of our own designs which is progressing well as a company in it's own right, Grainger Guitars...

During producing our first bass we decided to make our own bridge....the sustain was fantastic and it looked cool as well so we began looking into designing our own wrap around and hard tail guitar bridges.  The combination of our precision engineering experience and passion for music and all things guitar is resulting in high quality British manufactured guitar hardware.  Overtime we will develop more types and styles of hardware to offer a one stop solution for your guitar hardware needs......with our commitment to British manufacturing and quality products!