Here is his history from www.melobarted.blogspot.com
"The first thing I wanted was the old slot style pull down on the string but not have to deal with those miserable reverse slots. Ned Steinberger had come up with something that looked like the old Stringmaster ash tray but far better in that it was easy to use Grovers and easy to get to the strings. I licensed that from Ned and built my first wood ...Melobro
From that I started talking to Paul Beard about trying to come up with a way to open the sound chamber and make it less expensive to build than wood. A man named Carl Neeley approached me at a Bluegrass festival about building him a fiberglass Dobro...well it sounded kind of odd but I'd seen something like that it seemed. Dad and Rudy had played around with fiberglass electric guitars and a few old proto-types were around. I went home and dug through that pile and found...a fiberglass resonator standard neck guitar. I have no idea what they were up to but they had experimented with it.
So we built the first Neeley model Melobro
They were HEAVY though because they were done with a chop gun mold. I talked to Neeley about changing that and he wouldn't so I abandon that manufacturing process and tried to figure out a way to change the way we molded them.
Fiberglass is basically fibers with resin (what is wood...fiber and resin) so taking that in mind we started trying to simulate how wood patterns itself with the rings and the sound was great. We reduced the weight in half but we lost a lot of strength. The first G model Melobros came apart at the seems or imploded. Paul sent me a box of parts back and said forget it.
I was stuck - until this guy walked into the shop and said "that's not the way you make wood and fiberglass work together. My father created airplane model kits with fiberglass and wood. Let me show you." he came back three days later with new molds and working models. His name was Bert Quenzar and he is the genius behind the Melobro. It still took 17 different molds to get it to work right. And it was the hardest work I had ever done in my life. Miserable to work with fiberglass and resin at that level.
The model 17 Raybay model (Banjo Slayer)
We also found we could run a neck through design - mold a 335 arch in the back so the neck through was suspended in the body - then put mahogany sound plates on the neck through that deflected the sound out of the upper bout better and added a wood tone. The tone, volume, sustain, everything was fantastic about this guitar - except it was murder to build. The body mold was never perfect so you had to prebuild the guitar entirely - then disassemble and paint it, then rebuild it again. Hours and hours of time in a guitar that originally had been thought to cost less to build.
In one of my conversations with Tim Sheerhorn he encouraged me to just stick it out. But I was painting, building, designing, sanding, assembling, shipping, doing all of it. And I still had to build Rattlers and Steelgitrs and CC-8's to pay the bills. It was overwhelming. The original Melobro was sold with the Melobar project to Jim Frost. Five years later Jim Frost approached Ted Smith to build again and he agreed only under the company Hardway Guitars in Boise. They created new molds and some improvement in design and the way the instrument was jigged. The show was also being used by RnR Hardwood floors and some flooring caught fire on one side of the shop. The fire was so hot it melted the paint off guitars.
RnR collected the insurance money, Jim Frost took the finished guitars and Ted was left with the jigs and molds and parts. Ted built a couple of guitars and then Lincoln took over the molds and jigs to continue the project.
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