Construction Update 2020: Hand-Make Electrical Guitar

Construction Update

Like many others, COVID-19 has affected my project and de-scoped it from it’s original vision. The main issue is having something functional/completes a task/dynamic at the end of the project. The progress so far (figure 1) shows my electrical guitar body. It took 10 hours alone band-sawing and outlining the frame of the body itself out of the hard and inexpensive plywood that I am using. I have outlined the cuts needed for the neck and bridge pickup, bridge, and electrical components that go into the guitar body itself, from the SolidWorks file that I had, in previous. Hand-making the rest of the guitar will be the equivalent of a 50 hour work week, that I do not think is plausible, given I have 3 other spring graduate courses that have also had major changes, largely not in benefit, as they are mainly engineering courses. I will try my best, but I do not know what to do. If anyone could provide feedback as to this, having something dynamic, that would help. What I do have – is CAD renderings of the electrical guitar body that I was originally going to cut, with the ITLL CNC machines. I have also included some timelapse videos that will start to show the documentation of my current progress if you want to download and view. Thank you.

Figure 1: Electrical body frame and outline of the pickups seen in the background, will use wood boring bits to drill into pickup locations, chisel, hammer, and sand finish.

Timelapse 1

Link 1: Timelapse of current progress: made one of the rooms in the apartment a machine shop and starting the drill process. To view, download the link

Timelapse 2:

Link 2: Timelapse of the dissassembly of current guitar, that I am planning to re-purpose, for its components

Below are some previous CAD renderings of the guitar body that I was planning on CNC Machining with the ITLL lathe machines. By placing my CAD drawing into their program, the cuts could have been done overnight. By hand and with limited power tools, it is a much harder scope to something functional in a week.

Figure 2: The top row is the rendering I had chosen to outline my guitar pickups with.

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1 Comment. Leave new

  • Hailee Pritchard
    April 15, 2020 9:44 pm

    Hey Will! I’m sorry this project is seaming more daunting because of COVID-19. I think that it is not a reasonable expectation for you to hand make the rest of the guitar given the circumstances and the amount of time you’ve already put into the project. I think if you could make some progress on the rest of the guitar, enough so you can see the dynamic vision for the project, you will have a really successful project. Even if you transformed your vision from a working guitar to a piece of art, it’s something you could always come back to but would still fulfill this project. Good luck, I can’t wait to see how it turns out!

    Reply

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