I am reminded that back in the 80's I actually considered going into the carbon fiber guitar neck business. As you can imagine, with all the carbon fiber airplane parts in Wichita - it seemed like a natural. The big plus - I could build the tooling cheap, and materials sellers here in Wichita were eager to exploit a second industry dealing in high tech materials. It helped that one of my brothers was in the team building the first all-graphite airplane for commercial use (the Beech Starship), and he had access to methods, and production engineering materials. I wasn't going to use a vacuum pump, just an old
oven (because guitar necks didn't have to be strong enough for flight stresses).But someone told the guy running Modulus Graphite (Geoff something. It's been a long time), who sent me a cease and desist order with a reminder to pay a hefty licensing fee if I went ahead with production, and that the firepower of the legal team employed by Hughes Aircraft (who owns Modulus) would be trained on little old me if I was stupid enough to try.
It's just as well, because other companies entered the fray soon after and my puny efforts would have been lost like a fart in a whirlwind.