School of Rock: Building an Electric Guitar with the Product Design & Manufacturing Collection

The process starts with PDF files of guitar designs, which are imported into AutoCAD. These are correctly scaled and once the shape of the guitar body is finalised, the new shape is imported into Inventor. The new shape is overlayed onto an AnyCAD model in Inventor and then modified to suit the new design. The electro components are positioned into the guitar body and virtually wired. Some drawing verification is done to ensure that everything is the right size, as the guitar needs to sound right, then renderings are done in Inventor. A nesting study is then run to optimise material usage for a future production run. A CNC study will also be created for future manufacturing runs. The prototype will be built with hand tools. Next I show how to create templates for building the guitar body in AutoCAD. In this instance, 1:1 layouts are printed out and then used to cut solid oak to size. Additional templates for the pockets are also created.