No, it didn’t take me six months to finish the guitar–it just felt like it (and I’ve only now gotten around to posting the pictures). Not bad looking, eh? And you should hear how it sounds! All in all, this was a fantastic experience, and the finished guitar came out better than I dared imagine.

This is my final post about the build process. You can read Parts 1, 2, and 3 here, here, and here.

All that was left was the clear coat. To make things easy (well, easier…) we used cans of aerosol laquer. To ensure that everything got coated evenly, we set up a makeshift poorly-ventilated paint room in the garage. We hung the guitar through its pegholes with a bent coat-hanger contraption:

It’s time for a long-overdue update on the guitar progress. Here are my earlier posts for those of you following along at home:

Part 1: The Design
Part 2: The Neck

First up for the body: finding wood. Although my goal was to make a unique, new-to-the-world guitar, I smartly decided to stay conservative when it came to body geometry, wood choice, et cetera. Even experienced luthiers cannot fully predict what a guitar will sound like before it is strung up, so if i was to output a reasonably playable instrument, it would probably be best not to be too adventurous with my materials choices.

Since I’ve always wanted but could never afford a Les Paul, I chose a nice African mahogany body with a bird’s-eye maple top. I found some mahogany on eBay and bought a nice chunk of bird’s-eye from the local woodworking supply shop. Since I wanted a book-matched top, I ended up spending hours using a combination of table saws, hand saws, and planers to make this one piece of wood into two. The local woodworkers’ guild was very generous with their planer, but it still took a LOT of elbow grease for me to make the bookmatching cut. Before doing anything else, I made a cardboard outline and mocked up the body with some hardware and a fingerboard. As always–I figured an early and rough mock-up would help me decide what to change. In this case, it looked pretty good, so I plowed ahead:

After gluing up the wood and cutting out a rough profile on the bandsaw, I was pleased with the result:

The next step was shaping the arch on top. Using my trusty microplane, I first turned the flat surface into three sloping planes to set the neck angle and bridge position correctly. Making paper templates for everything was very important. Next, I sloped all of the sides down to the correct position around the edges. This all went surprisingly smoothly, but my arm was starting to look like Popeye’s by the end. Unfortunately, the arch does not look very exciting in pictures yet, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

After (carefully!) chiseling out the neck pocket, I could finally put everything together for the first time. This was one of several rewarding moments throughout the process that reassured me that this work was going toward an end:

The next steps were to bandsaw out the cutaway and drill holes for the pickups. In retrospect, I would have had a cleaner result using a router for the pickup holes, but my drill press + chisel method was just fine too. They’re hidden anyways, so nobody will know… unless they read this. You can see some of the nice figuring on the wood in this picture as well:

I did learn my lesson with the control cavity–using a router and two templates for the main cavity and the shelf for its plate:

The binding was also a challenge. I used a Dremel tool with a special guide fixture from Stewart McDonald. Special credit goes to my dad, who convinced me against my will that a binding would be cool enough to justify the trouble.

Speaking of my dad, here he is holding the guitar after gluing the neck to the body:

At this point, I could not wait to string it up and start jamming. The remaining steps–wiring up the electronics and installing the bridge and tailpiece–flew by in a couple of days:

And voila! I strummed the first notes and it sounded and played way better than I had expected. All that’s left is finishing, dressing the frets, and performing a few other tweaks. I am still undecided on the finish, so if anybody has ideas (preferably along with a sample picture), please post it in the comments.

I was feeling a little bad about my tape dispenser design being rather, well, bourgeois–so I decided to take another stab at it. This was also an excuse for me to play around with some of SolidWorks’ sheet metal tools. Behold: a tape dispenser for the people!

This is a one-piece sheet metal design. The tape roll can be removed by squeezing together the protruding tabs. It comes in anodized aluminum and galvanized steel–mostly because these materials looked cool for the renderings. The drawing below includes the flat-pattern shape, in case you are wondering what the original cut-out would look like.

If anybody knows of an ongoing tape dispenser design contest, I would love to hear about it!

Having gotten my SolidWorks CSWP-Surfacing certification this week, I was itching for a little project. Here are the results:

It’s not very clear from the renderings, but the orange thing is made of rubber and pulls apart inside the tape ring for when you want to change rolls. The base is a cast metal with chrome plating and there is a rubber non-stick base.

Obviously this would be a rather expensive and non-green product. But I had lots of fun modeling it and would love some feedback on the design.

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.

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 Digital Designer

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/doodlerecall/

Here’s an excerpt in case you don’t want to read the whole thing:

“Andrade’s team asked 40 people to listen to a recording containing the names of people and places. Afterwards the people wrote down the names they could remember.

While listening, half of the test subjects were also required to shade in shapes on a piece of paper. Afterwards, they remembered one-third more names than test subjects who didn’t doodle while listening”

Just as I had suspected, based on my own extremely unscientific self-observation! Based on the paper’s hypothesis, these results should apply not only to sketching, but also to other “small cognitive load” activities, e.g. fidgeting with a paperclip.

Thanks, Tracy!

Original Paper: “What does doodling do?” By Jackie Andrade. Applied Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 3, Feb. 26, 2009.

My apologies for the infrequent posting. Since my last update, I have become a MASTER OF SCIENCE, and am now fully qualified to do… well, I’m not quite sure what exactly, but I definitely feel smarter. Now that my schedule is a little less hectic, I will hopefully have more time to do some writing.

Thank you to everybody for the feedback on the alarm clock design. It seems to be quite a passionate subject for many of us, and there are clearly some good designs out there that have yet to be created or adopted– despite the wealth of effort that has been put into the subject. While a better alarm design may make make my life better in the long run, I’m thoroughly enjoying my current streak of not having to use one.