Guitar design using parametric modelling

When thinking about my next guitar (and my first cello) I wanted to find a way of easily iterating my own designs of body shapes which could be easily “pulled around” and manipulated without re-drawing.  After a bit of investigation I decided to look for a parametric drawing package.

I eventually turned up an interesting package called Solve-space. This package seemed to have a number of key advantages:

• It is free software  🙂
• It has a very light footprint
• for 2D work the interface is simple and easy to learn

Solve-Space is free software, distributed under the GPLv3 and can be found to download at solvespace.com.

I then tried to understand how some of the more celebrated guitar shapes had been designed and created myself a simple parametric template which I then proceeded to “fit” to the published shapes and dimensions.  The source of these existing designs I got from a very good book by Roy Courtnall called “Making Master Guitars”.

The solvespace template I used can be downloaded here guitar template Alabaster (after dowloading change the extension from .txt to .slvs

Here is a table of parameters I used for fitting to the established guitar designs and what I used for my own design: