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:
Finally got to the point where I can start finishing my 5th guitar. This one is to my own design with a number of changes compared with the Ramirez 1a based design for most of my earlier instruments:
Scale length of 650mm instead of 664mm
Narrower neck @51mm instead of 53mm
C- shape neck rather than D-shape
New body shape
Solid rather than double sides
Different top bracing loosely based around ideas of Romanillos
Addition longitudinal back braces to try and get more of the back active
