Hollow-body electric guitar

[Chris_G]

Hi,
Here is my biggest FreeCAD modeling project so far : a hollow-body electric guitar.

Guitar-1.jpeg (124.83 KiB) Viewed 6092 times

The top and back have a arched shape, modeled from a point cloud I already had.
The tuners, however, have been quite a challenge for me ( the worm gears especially ).
So they're not completely accurate, but they look good enough.

Guitar-2.jpeg (86.98 KiB) Viewed 6092 times

Guitar-3.jpeg (70.31 KiB) Viewed 6092 times

Here are the bridge, the tailpiece and a pickup :

Guitar-4.jpeg (84.21 KiB) Viewed 6092 times

A view with the top removed :

Guitar-5.jpeg (82.51 KiB) Viewed 6092 times

[Chris_G]

The most difficult part has been the modeling of the highlighted surfaces below :

Guitar-6.jpeg (33.5 KiB) Viewed 6087 times

These surfaces have to make a smooth transition, but there is another constraint.
If you extend the straight central part of the neck at both ends, the surfaces have to "cover" the extended neck part.
All my attempts to create these transition surfaces with the Gui, resulted in some kind of hollow areas like this :

pic-11.jpeg (14.6 KiB) Viewed 6087 times

But thanks to the FC's python scripting, I finally got an acceptable result.
Happy New Year !
Chris

[Jee-Bee]

Nice one!!

[yorik]

Amazing!!

[NormandC]

Chris,

This is incredible. I'm envious, I've wanted to model my own acoustic in forever, I still haven't made the time to do it.

I have a few questions for you

• How did you model the fretboard, did you use a macro? Years ago forum member ryback08 made one
• Did you model each fret bar individually, then placed it at the correct location?
• I assume you made the body shape by scripting rather than using GUI tools?

Thanks for sharing!

[Chris_G]

My main design software is Inkscape ( I feel comfortable with it ).

Tesla-10.jpg (37.39 KiB) Viewed 6017 times

This is what I use to tweak and modify the drawing until the customer validates it.
I made an extension in inkscape to generate fretboards.
So the SVG I import in FC has the fret lines.
Then I used some python scripting to create the frets ( bend the fret lines according to fretboard radius, and sweep a sketch along them ).
Time for a good dinner now.
Good night, and have fun !
Chris

[Konstantin]

Nice guitar. Some time ago I tried to make violin like electric guitar in FreeCAD. I wrote about my problems with deck curves somewhere here.

Can you show, or tell me, how you made your deck? With sections, or nurbs, or else somehow?

[ppemawm]

Most excellent...well done, incredible attention to detail.
Nice presentation as well.
I can see there is much to be learned in FreeCAD for us novices. Can you post the file(s) on Dropbox or are they proprietary?

[Chris_G]

Hi,
To model the arched surface of the top, I started from a point cloud.
Last year, I scanned a guitar top I had with a touch probe on my CNC.
So I had a rectangular set of points.
I imported it with the Points Workbench, and made a approximating Nurbs surface with the reverse engineering Workbench.
Then I imported the body contour from inkscape, and made boolean operations to extract the guitar top face.
( See the attached file )
So , unfortunately, it is not 100% made in FC ...

GuitarTop.fcstd

(279.18 KiB) Downloaded 122 times

[Chris_G]

Hi,

I can see there is much to be learned in FreeCAD for us novices.

Ahaha, that is funny to hear this from a mad man who modeled a whole engine !

Can you post the file(s) on Dropbox or are they proprietary?

The file is pretty big ( 70 MB ) and the document tree is a real mess. I have no Dropbox account, but I should be able to upload it on Github.