Project Description: This five-person, semester-long project was the focal point of Stringed Instrument Design and Manufacturing in Fall 2022. We were tasked with designing our own electric guitars starting with hand sketches on paper, then CAD, then physical manufacturing via CNC routing. The class was a great instructional experience for manufacturing, production
Software Used: Fusion 360
My Role: I did the design and CAM toolpaths for the neck of our guitars. I also designed, soldered, and assembled the electronics of our guitars.
Other Roles: Another team member handled the CAD and CAM for the body of the guitar. The bulk of the work for this project was harder to divide during the design stage, but once we go to all the steps of manufacturing, the team equally contributed with preparing our 5 sets of parts, such as other members preparing and planing our wood blanks, or pre-drilling mounting pin locations for CNC setup.
Big Wins: This class was one of my favorites because I got such a cool, tangible final product from it that I made from scratch. I also found a way to sneak 3D printing into our project to have an early prototype of the complex transition curves at the two ends of the neck to see how they felt in the hands. This led me to some refining tweaks before moving to full scale prototypes of the neck.
Challenges: Machine time and collective scheduling for all the groups in the lab was a limitation, along with the hard deadline of the end of the semester. I had to crunch to finish the guitar in time, but I’m so glad I did.
Key Takeaways: I learned a lot about working with wood as a material and got great experience with CAM and CNC routing. We also had to prototype our designs out of foam to demonstrate fit and feel, which was a good lesson in using cheap materials for that task.
Here’s my final guitar that I made for this class. One of my teammates was in a band and they wanted a Jazzmaster-styled body, so that’s what we went with.
We started the course with a 1:1 scale hand sketch of our guitar. I can’t find a digital version of that now, but here are some images of the 3D model of the guitar. I did the neck modeling.
The neck transition of a guitar is a complex curve as shown by the zebra striped view on top. To see how these transitions felt in the hand, I 3D printed 1:1 fit prototypes to get my group’s approval on the shape before moving from CAD to CAM.
Above is one of the passes of the CAM I did for the neck. The specific image is a finishing pass to get the back of the neck to ~95% smooth before hand sanding. After this operation, the blank gets flipped over and the front side has a few routing operations done.
To validate our CAM toolpaths, we made a foam prototype of our guitar. Since the materials is significantly cheaper than wood and faster to cut, it’s a perfect opportunity to do a dry run in case any part-killing mistakes exist in the process.
Here’s one of the final necks (of the 5 I produced for my team). I wish I had pictures from while it was on the router, but oh well.