Moving to WordPress

A heads-up:

I will be moving this blog to WordPress soon because their platform is much more flexible. The new site will still be accessible from http://benjaneering.com, and will preserve all of the old posts and comments. In addition to the blog, I will also be adding new pages about my design work--with the intention of turning Benjaneering into more of a webfolio.

Stay tuned for the switch.

Guitar Project Part 2: The Neck

With the specifications in place, it was time to start getting my hands dirty. I will try to keep this post brief, but I would be happy to share more of what I learned if anybody has specific questions.

My friend Will generously permitted me to salvage components from a very cool looking but irreparably damaged guitar of his. Besides a usable truss rod and some cool-looking knobs, it was great to have this around for reference and reverse-engineering purposes.


I decided to start with the neck, since it is the most dimensionally critical and easy to mess-up part of the guitar. I had chosen to make the neck out of maple because it is stronger than mahogany, allowing a thinner design without worrying about the truss rod breaking through the back.

To make the neck blank, I cut up a long plank of nice-looking maple (from a local lumber yard) and laminated it three wide. Laminating provides extra strength, since the grain runs in slightly different directions in each section. After laminating, I routed a channel for the truss rod.

Here you can see the neck blank with the truss rod loosely in place:


To add some additional thickness where the headstock would be, I glued two more pieces of maple to the sides, making it five wide. The next step was to cut out the profiles--vertical and horizontal--on a band saw. The band saw I was using needed quite a bit of setup and a new blade. I spent a good amount of time getting to know the saw before making the cut, because this step was critical and cutting through 3'' of hard maple is not a trivial matter.

Fortunately, everything came out great. Before attaching the fingerboard, I would need to drill the access hole for the truss rod and cement the rod with epoxy. "Hey!" I thought, "this is starting to look like a guitar!"


I had originally planned on making the guitar entirely from scratch, but I quickly realized that buying a pre-slotted fingerboard was the way to go. Accurately shaping and slotting my own would have required a significant investment in tools and time. Also, if I screwed up the fret spacing even a little, it would render the guitar unplayable. So I was happy to buy a pre-slotted rosewood fingerboard (pictured above, next to the neck) from Stewart-MacDonald.

Now for the fun part: shaping the neck. There really isn't much of a science to this; I shaved it down to a slightly asymmetrical profile that felt good in my hand. I started at the ends and then worked down the middle, checking the progress periodically with a straightedge.

For this task, my Microplane was my best friend. These are also great for grating cheese, but I wouldn't recommend using the same blade.


Next up: fretting. Although I can't really know how good my fretting job was until the guitar is finished, this step seemed easier than I had anticipated. I cut the frets and bent them by hand with pliers, and then gently hammered them into the fingerboard. Filing down the ends took a little while, but the process was ultimately nothing to fret about (lame pun intended).


If I were planning on making fret marker inlays, it would have been easier to do this before installing the frets. I may change my mind at some point and put inlays in, but I think the fingerboard looks rather nice naked. I'm not big on needless ornamentation. Side dots, however, would be necessary for playability. These were a breeze to make: simply drill holes in the fingerboard, glue in a plastic rod, and cut it flush.


At this point, the neck was pretty much finished. I was very pleased with my success, and with the amount that I was learning about guitars and woodworking. So much for keeping this post brief! Stay tuned for progress on the body.

Guitar Project Part 1: The Design

Working at SolidWorks, I see CAD used for all sorts of cool things on a daily basis, so it didn't take long for me to start itching for my own design project. One day this summer, I (literally) woke up and decided that I was going to design and build an electric guitar. My goals were threefold:

1. Teach me some new CAD tricks
2. Teach me about woodworking
3. Make something totally badass that I could rock out on, for less than buying a new instrument
   

Knowing essentially nothing about the luthier's trade, I first had to read up on the topic. It didn't take long for me to find "the bible": Melvyn Hiscock's Make Your Own Electric Guitar. I read this cover-to-cover before attempting anything else, and I highly recommend that anybody undertaking a similar project do the same.

Other indispensable resources include the Project Guitar Forum, and of course Stewart-MacDonald--the bane of my wallet, and the ultimate luthers' porn.

Based on my reading and a close examination of friends' Strats, Les Pauls, et cetera, I started the CAD mock-up. This was both incredibly fun and incredibly nerve-wracking. There are tens of absolutely critical dimensions, and nearly all are dependent on each other and on the bridges, pick-ups, frets, nuts, and tailpieces that you will buy. For anybody who has ever sketched out the body shape of their dream axe, know that designing a guitar from the ground up is an engineering project in the truest sense.

Anyways, here are the initial results (click to expand):


Not my best rendering efforts, but the model files were unfortunately lost in a poorly executed hard-drive replacement. The lesson, as always: back up your stuff!

Fortunately, I did have a chance to print out a totally sweet 1:4 scale stereolithography model:


Cool, huh? Stay tuned for part 2 :)

Lego CAD!

Kids these days have it too easy:

LEGO Digital Designer