Monday, October 26, 2009

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 :)
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2 comments:

  1. jonathanOctober 26, 2009 at 4:23 PM

    Goodness Ben, 1:4? SLA is probably the best way to go, if that was printed, it would've cost tons of money.

    Anyways, it looks really nice. How do you propose that you're going to make it in reality?

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  2. Ben SchriesheimOctober 27, 2009 at 10:20 AM

    I was fortunate enough to have free access to an underutilized SLA machine, so it cost me nothing. Also, I think that the cost is mostly determined by the Z height of the model. In this case, it was only about 1/2'' thick at the most, so it was definitely doable. You can't really tell from the picture, but the bridge, tuners, and frets all came out with really fine detail--I was pleasantly surprised by how accurate the print was.

    I'll be posting soon about my progress making it out of wood. Right now it's a little over halfway done.

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