Those silly Germans and their engineering…

geteilt von: https://feddit.org/post/36651939

So, I had kind of a mishap a few weeks ago: the original bridge of my Vihuela de Mano ripped clean off when I tried to bring the strings to tension. Might be that the glue surface was too cold or the natural oil in the rosewood prevented a proper bond. Or the glue surface was simply too small for 42kg of string tension.

After some consideration, I decided to redesign the bridge to be more of a lute style (with 3x the glue surface of the original bridge), while trying to preserve the original look. It's now made of cherry, with ebony and ivory inlays.

We might have too much flame and birdseye maple. This is our overflow shelf.

Probably doxing myself with this post 🙃

A first set of forms for this year! It's a cnc cut solera + outer mould + side bending form, made of plywood, MDF board, aluminum pipe, threaded rods and PLA.

Apparently CNC machines don't like long, continuous splines, like the parts of the outer mould. At one point the controller couldn't handle the huge amount of commands and slowed down, resulting in vibrations piling up and pulling the milling bit out of the spindle. The bit made a hole in the surface of my 1000€ vacuum table before exploding.

No lasting functional damage, except for the milling bit, but it hurt like hell - emotionally.

I plan to make a set of forms for a Torres guitar next - with optimized settings, so this mishap doesn't happen again.

Photos:

I'm not sure if this is the correct community to ask in but it seemed like it's worth a shot. I received a sitar from a friend to learn on. It's beautiful but well-loved and I've been trying to find someone to fix it up a bit. There's a guy in Queens, NY who works on them but I haven't heard the best things about him. The only other lead I've found is someone in Washington State who said I could ship it to him. I only have a soft case for it and fear it could be really expensive to ship that far. Does anyone here work on sitars and could also sell me a hard case for it?

I'll record a sound sample as soon as the strings have settled.

Edit: I got it to stay in tune for a few seconds!

I found it like this. No really.

Elbow deep in other more important projects, but I managed to fit in some time to push this OM cutaway a little closer to completion.

Adirondack top (maybe a little floppy…) and bubinga body (assuming it behaves going into the mold…).

I’ve been jokingly calling the buttwedge design the Double Black Diamond (DBD for short). Koa with ebony and glitter bullshit. Figuring out how to safely route the pocket was a fun puzzle that was definitely OVER ENGINEERED. Very pleased with the results though.

Taking suggestions for inlay designs for both the head stock and fingerboard. They’ll both likely be ebony or some other dark hardwood depending on what I can scrounge up. I have plenty of shell, stone, etc. for color and/or detail and a machine that can cut them a hell of a lot cleaner than I can.

This particular guitar is a giveaway item for a bunch of beer drinking craftsmen, so really almost anything goes.

More builds to come soon.

Keep luth’n!

Bubinga, Plum, and Walnut (yes it’s 4 pieces; I had to get creative and it’s getting color so you’ll never notice 😄)

It’s all Sitka. Back and sides to follow.

Just a "quick" project to test carving techniques on my new cnc.

Made from very old beech wood that was exposed to the elements (body), cherry (tailpiece and nut), maple (bridge).

Hi, 3d printing a nut guy again. Finally have all the materials and I think enough skill to model this thing on my own.

Exactly what tolerances should I have in the channels of the nut for the strings? Like, for example my low B string is a .59. How large should I make that channel? 1.50mm? A little more room perhaps?

Thanks for any responses!

Hey there. I have an Ibanez AX-7221 (Japanese made version) that has a damaged nut. I need to replace it, but am financially locked but do have access to a 3d printer.

Are there materials that can be printed which would be ok for this task and stand up to the stresses?

Edit: <3 to everyone that has given advice here. Much better than the 3d printing community's answers I got.