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:
Romanillos | Bouchet | Freiderich | Alabaster | |
Drawing pdf | romanillos | Bouchet | Freiderich | Alabaster |
Length | 488 | 484 | 489 | 488 |
Upper bout width | 278 | 280 | 280 | 280 |
Upper bout distance between circle centre and centreline | 46 | 51 | 47 | 46.3 |
Upper bout large circle diameter | 244 | 327 | 327 | 327 |
Ratio of lower bout to upper bout circle diameters | 0.772:1 | 0.766:1 | 0.757:1 | 0.777:1 |
Lower bout distance between circle centres and guitar centreline | 60 | 60 | 61 | 60 |
Lower bout width | (360) | (366) | (370) | (360.4) |
Lower bout large circle diameter | 488 | 484 | 489 | 488 |
Waist width | 236 | 241 | 240 | 224 |
Waist curve diameter | 80 | 100 | 80 | 80 |
Heel to waist | 194 | 180 | 194 | 187 |
Heel to sound hole | 151.5 | 151.5 | 151.5 | 151.5 |
Sound hole diameter | 87 | 87 | 89 | 87 |