Tech Brief 01-05-015

Reverse Engineering a Custom Guitar

Problem:

Custom made guitars are works of art created by hours of shaping and sanding by hand by a skilled luthier. However, creation of a 3D CAD model is required for mass production.

Traditional Method:

Trying to recreate the guitar from hand measurements or have a luthier duplicate the original may produce a nice guitar, but will it will not likely maintain the same sound quality or “feel” of the original.

NeoMetrix Solution:

  • Original part (Figure 1) is Laser scanned in house using the Konica Minolta Range 7 scanner. (accuracy of .0015”)
  • Scan Data is registered, merged, and aligned in Rapidform XOR to produce a polygon mesh (Figure 2).
  • Mesh is used as a reference to create a parametric solid model in Rapidform XOR.

NeoMetrix Advantage:

  • Feasible to obtain quality data previously unavailable by other means.
  • Final CAD model is parametric, and can thereby by easily updated or modified in customer CAD system.
  • Feature based model consisting of trimmed surfaces provides for easier CAM programming, than other “rapid surfacing” techniques.

Get Started Today

Figure 1 – Guitar in use

Figure 2 – Laser Scanned Data

Figure 3 – Final Solid Model