Las Vegas guitar fixer purchases rare Plek Station machine

After spending years as a singer and guitar player in California, Teresa Topaz moved to Las Vegas and founded her own guitar repair shop.

Topaz Guitar Repair is now the only solo female-owned guitar repair shop in the world with a rare machine: the Plek Station.

When Topaz moved to Las Vegas in 2019, she saw an opportunity to specialize in structural damage to guitars caused by the dry and hot climate. She said she hopes her purchase of the Plek Station paves the way for more women to get involved in the engineering side of a traditionally male-dominated industry.

“I’ve always had this joke: If you’re gonna be a woman in rock ‘n’ roll, you better know more than the men,” Topaz said.

Plek Stations are glass boxes resembling small phone booths. Inside is an assortment of machinery designed to analyze the smallest structural details of guitars and make necessary repairs.

Topaz’s machine sits in the corner of a red room she renovated out of her garage to serve as a work space. Humidifiers sit on the floor nearby, with the goal of keeping guitars in good condition.

Rare machine

Ninety Plek Stations are installed in repair shops worldwide, according to Plek’s website. Many major cities in the U.S. have at least one nearby, with Las Vegas being an exception until Topaz’s recent purchase. She said the machine cost about $113,000.

The Plek Station cuts down parts of the repair process from hours to 22 minutes, Topaz said, all while mitigating the physical strain associated with grinding metal while hunched over.

“This is something that’s really not spoken about in our industry, but this industry is very difficult on the body,” she added. “This industry will run your body into the ground if you let it.”

Topaz, who already had a guitar business in California, moved to Las Vegas to care for her mom. She said getting operations up and running for a new business in Las Vegas was difficult because of restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Businesses were still being forced to stay closed if you were not considered an essential business,” Topaz said. “So I started doing pickup and delivery and trying to, you know, abide by the regulations back then.”

Desert climate can damage guitars

Her main category of guitar repairs involves structural damage caused by the Las Vegas climate. Both the extreme heat and dry environment hurt guitars in a volume that just didn’t happen in California, Topaz said.

“Artwork, anything made of wood that’s delicate or fabric is going to be affected by the desert weather here,” she explained. “So I would probably say about 90 percent of what comes into the shop is all avoidable, because it’s due to lack of humidity.”

The Plek Station is expected to help with those repairs. Topaz said she can only do a few repairs by hand per week because of how physically demanding the process is, but the machine can do anywhere from four to eight a day. It still requires a skilled operator though.

One way in which Topaz said she anticipates the speed of machine-assisted repairs to come in handy is in fixing guitars fast for artists visiting Las Vegas to perform. She previously had to do these by hand, such as when a guitarist performing for a Luke Bryan show at Resorts World needed help, Topaz said.

“They had just gotten off a plane from Nashville,” she added. “Vegas, you know, during the summer, the lack of humidity and the heat will throw an instrument into shock. And so I did a level for them.”

Topaz said she hopes her purchase of the Plek Station encourages more women to get involved with the technology and the engineering side of guitar repairs. There’s been “a lot of pushback over the years” due to her gender, she added.

“There’s a reason my face is on the website,” Topaz said. “It’s not a vanity thing. It’s purely for the reason of, if you have initial issues with a woman helping you out with your repair needs, then you won’t call me and we both stay happy that way.”

As for her work as a performer, Topaz provided guitar and vocals for her 12-track album “Reset Me” in 2015 and produced a single titled “Whiskey Kinda Girl” in 2019. She said she’s hoping to release a rock ‘n’ roll record sometime in the near future.

Contact Finnegan Belleau at fbelleau@reviewjournal.com.