UK company based in Leeds, UK. Manufactured parts from China and assembly and finish work in the UK.  Limited production but catering for the low end of the market with reaonable quality for the price range; evan supporting stainless steel frets on some models and Tone rider pups.

Harmos Guitars were designed and made by T. Sage Harmos and James Baecker.  T. Sage Harmos (born 1961) was a steel guitar player and over a period of ten years he refined his design for a structural space frame lap steel guitar. This instrument has a structure made of wooden spheres connected by carbon fiber rods - inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller. His aim was to use a combination of the latest carbon fiber materials and structural design geometry to build easy to play, light weight, affordable instruments with transparent tone and ultra-long sustain. The first prototype (completed in 1998) weighed two and a half pounds. In 2001 he started getting  The Harmos Space Frame lap steel guitar into the hands of lap steel players. As well as the lap steel there was also a conventional guitar - the Harmos Matrax.

Source: Harmos Guitars website (archived 2003)

Collings Guitars was founded by Bill Collings  (1948 - 2017). He was pre-med student in the mid 1970s but left to work in a machine shop in Ohio while also starting to build acoustic guitars at home. He left the machine shop to work for an oil pipeline company in Houston - still making acoustic guitars in his spare time. Before long local musicians such as Rick Gordon and Lyle Lovett were playing his guitars. He set out for California but only made it as far as Austin where he set up a space in Tom Ellis' workshop. By the mid-1980s, Bill was making flattop and archtop acoustic guitars in his own workshop. With growing success in the 1980s he moved again to a larger workshop in 1989 and took on his first employees. His work for Gruhn Guitars brought national exposure - and he soon needed to move to an evening bigger factory.