Well,
There has been a lot of discussion over the past few months about vacuum fixtures for guitar building. There has been a lot advice on how to make your own but many people would rather spend the time building guitars and just purchase the fixtures...except they are as scarce as hen's teeth! Well, I have teamed up with a partner to develop and produce a line of vacumm fixtures and other percision lutherie items. A warning, the vacuum fixtures are not that cheap but at least now they are available! Here are some pics of the prototypes that are actually my own fixtures. We will be 'cleaning up' the design a bit by softening the corners and such.
This is a picture of the dish with the lid sitting beside it. These dishes are about 24 inches square on the outside and are cnc milled from 3/4 inch acrylic. The lid in this picture is a glued together frame but we think that for the production models we will mill the lid from one piece of acrylic and will use the piece left from the middle to make bridge clamps.
Here is the system under vacuum with a test piece on my bench. For now we have black rubber but may change the colour if we can find what we are looking for for the right price.
This is a picture of my vacuum pump. Just so you know that you don't require an expensive or elaborate pump system to run these things, this one is built from an old refrigerator compressor and a 20 pound reservoir tank.
This is the start of my guitar holder. I will be designing a base for it that will be a wood/aluminum composite. We will probably make an all aluminum version very soon but still just offer just the dish so that you can make a fixture that best suits your working environment.
On the "percision tools" side of things we will also be offering fret scales made from 1/8 aluminum flatbar. Here are two that I had made for my guitars.
We will be designing and making other useful items as we get requests.
Now the prices! The dishes are $175 USD each, the lids will be $160. We have designed these so that the vacumm works from the lid so you will only need one lid, no matter how many dishes you have, for example I have 3 dishes, 15 foot radius, 25 foot raduis and 30 foot radius and just the one lid.
The guitar holder clamp is $110. When we have the base designed it will probably be in the $200 range, plus or minus.
The fret scales are $36 USD each and will come with a pin that can be installed into your fretting fixture. The slot width is .125 inches.
I would be interested to see how many of you would be interested in these products and would also like to know what other items you would like to see. We will be offering a bridge clamp and will have a prototype out in a bit. My partner will be tied up for the next couple of weeks so I have some time to get this all up and running. If there is interest I will also get a price together for the guages and hoses for my vacuum pump and do up a little schematic that can be included with the purchase of the hardware, or maybe I will post it up on my website...gotta think on that one a bit!
Thanks
Shane
Our original idea was to build both what you're building (radius is already built into the base), and a base that would allow builders to use their existing 24 inch radius dishes. Don ended up building four of the latter, I think, for various people.
