The Collings Forum

Hello all,
I tend to store my OM1 on a wall hanger in a humidity controlled room in my house and have only had about 5 occasions to take the guitar out of the house in its TKL case since I bought it back in November of 2020.
This morning, I went to put my guitar in its case so that I could take it over to a friend’s house for some jamming when I noticed that it was hard to get the guitar into the case. I don’t mean that it was a tight fit. I mean that the padding behind the lining felt as hard as wood! So much so that it actually made a scraping sound against the edges of the guitar. Needless to say that I didn’t force it. I did compress the felt/padding so that it felt softer and all around where the body of the guitar would go and then proceeded to load the guitar in.
My questions: Is this normal? What does this mean about the case? I’ve just never experienced this before (the cheap case that came with my old Alvarez hasn’t done this) so don’t know what think.

Thanks for weighing in!

In my ten years or so of owning multiple Collings--and TKL cases--this has never happened. So, from my experience, this is not at all normal. I'd get in touch with TKL. Not sure what's happening, but maybe someone else here on the forum will have an idea.

I recall a period of time where this hardening of the case padding occurred with TKL cases. I'd contact both Collings & TKL.

TKL has answered neither my voicemail nor my email, so I’ll reach out to Collings tomorrow. This is a the same case whose handle started falling apart the first time I took it out of the house, so I’m pretty unimpressed. Maybe this was just a bad batch?

The handles falling apart are sadly a common thing it seems.

Wproffitt wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 4:43 am TKL has answered neither my voicemail nor my email, so I’ll reach out to Collings tomorrow. This is a the same case whose handle started falling apart the first time I took it out of the house, so I’m pretty unimpressed. Maybe this was just a bad batch?

TKL has had inconsistent quality control for years. "a bad batch' is just a poor excuse for inadequate quality control IMO