Mikele wrote: ↑Wed Nov 10, 2021 9:19 am
Hi Frank,
how are you?
Did I mention that I have 3D printed a kind of neck extension for a special project?
Everything worked out perfectly, although I have to say that it is a symmetrical object without complicated transitions. I didn't even need your workbench for this. But it turned out pretty perfect for me as it is my first project with FreeCad.
Freecad only did not want to do a few small things, e.g. individual bevels or roundings on any edges.
Great.
Mikele wrote: ↑Wed Nov 10, 2021 9:19 am
Because of the workbench: I know that you have to think about a lot when it comes to programming. Are you aware of all the necessary details in the sense of a Luthier?
The neckthrough version is probably more complex when I think of two body halves and pickup millings that go through the neck and the body.
There are thousands of details in guitar making, and there are many variations in electric/acoustics guitars/basses/ukuleles/mandolines/... My goal is to provide a tool mainly for luthier apprentices and enthusiast that don't want to spend a life in cad software figuring out how to do a fretboard. When I built my first guitar I was overwhelmed with all the things to consider so I started the workbench to do some simulations before start making anything in real life.
One big problem is that luthiers are not CAD experts in general, so the language is quite strange. I want to provide a tool in luthier's language and not in CAD language. So we can adjust the fret number, scale, neck break angle, etc... instead of extrusions, boolean operations, nurbs, etc...
It is impossible to create a tool that cover all possible guitar designs without more advanced CAD tools, so the idea is that Marz Designer helps with a big part of the process for complex designs and if possible cover nearly 100% of the design of more standard designs similar to stratos or les pauls.
I have found that the neck geometry is the most problematic to do in FreeCAD because of limited surface tools, and because the problem is hard to generalize to support parametric designs with multiple asymmetries and custom profiles. In a neck (without even considering neck-thru) there are many complex things:
- Custom Heel geometry
- Neck Angle
- Headstock angle
- Custom Volute geometry
- Asymmetric profile section
- Asymmetric profile evolution from nut to heel
- Truss rod alignment and safe isolation
- Heel cut geometry (different from custom heel geometry)
- Pocket depth
- Custom headstock geometry
- Smooth transitions in between all sections...
The current MarzWorkbench for FreeCAD only contains my early ideas and solutions when i knew almost nothing about FreeCAD and OpenCascade
, I have learned a lot of OpenCascade in the past two years and the current Marz Designer version (WIP) has nothing in common with the MarzWorkbench implementation.
I think I have finished the modeling part for bolt-on-necks and set-necks, But modeling is only a part of a whole application. Multithreading is also hard to get done right and C++ is not precisely a cooperative language
(But I love it), there are also more aspects like application file format, cross compilation to support Linux/Windows/Mac, Installers for each platform, The plugin architecture to allow extensions, etc......
I work on all this things only few hours a month as a side project. I hope I will have something to release soon but it will imply a lot of support requests and i don't have time to attend that. So I want to release something stable enough to keep support tickets at minimum.
So, back to your question: I am myself a luthier apprentice, not an expert. This has been a journey and there is a lot to learn yet.
Frank.