Saturday, April 30, 2016

Exo-skeleton


I have not posted in a year, but I have done a fair amount of guitar hacking. Working through the backlog, I'll start with the most interesting hack: the exo-skeleton guitar.

I was thinking about how interesting it would be to expose a guitar's internal structure. This is tricky in that the "internal" bracing tends to be thin, delicate, and precise - a "ding" in a brace would be very, very bad. After much experimentation, I came up with a three layer "sandwich" design, where the top braces are between a "lower" partial top and a "upper" partial top.  In this case, the "lower" is some scrap Cedar and the bracing and "upper" is new growth Fir (a.k.a. 2x4). To complete the hack, cotter pins were used in place of normal bridge pins and it has a floating bridge.

The back is "backwards", it is single piece of birch plywood that was cut and fitted into the inside of the lining. One big brace down the middle, two "flying" braces across pull the back into the proper curve.

The neck is made out of strips of plywood laminated together. Sides are a couple layers of laminated 'el-cheapo cedar fence board.

It is, believe it or not, a rather normal sounding guitar.

Pictured is my cousin Denver Gulliford, the proud owner of this rather unique axe.