Official Luthiers Forum!

Hey out there! Does any one use CAD or similar programs to design your guitars?

I'm working on one now in CAD.

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"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered." G. K. Chesterton.

Me!!

All of my plans are drawn on Autocad and I offen do 3D renderings to get an Ideal of how they will look Here is one form the early day when Bruce Dicky and myself were throwing around the idea of an all Rosewood guitar

WOW the one using Auto Cad looks great. It the program hard to learn. And could you let me know the price. (Almost afraid to ask. Probably way out of my league.)

I typically use Autocad to draw up outlines, figure bridge locations based on scale length, maybe basic bracing - but a lot of things I will do by hand with a pencil on a piece of paper. I may end up scanning my sketch and adding it in. Just the way I like to do things - I use Autocad 8 hours a day at work, but guitars are much more hands-on to me than sanitary sewer lines

That said, the next guitar is going to be for a friend who is an architect - we swapped acad files back and forth firming up the design. As an architect she had some interesting things to add, and the inlay will be very different...

I have had an Autocad plan of my old Les Paul Jr. up on the web for years, both on an old site of mine as well as on another forum (sorry, it was long before OLF existed). You can find it at http://user.aol.com/drfuzz/lpjr.htm

Autocad didn't take me that long to get started - coming from a drafting background helped. Sadly, the LT version costs about 800-900$, and that's the cheap one Look around, though, there are other CAD programs out there that work well...

I have been using Solid Works CAD for much of my design work. I find that it makes me think through lots of issues before I actually cut any wood. I also like fact that I can print full size drawings that I can use as templates. I would recommend CAD to anyone who enjoys using computers for design. On a side note,I looked on Ebay and noticed there are some decent deals for Autocad LT. (specifically the Student Version).

Good Luck!

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Brad
Avon, OH

full blown version is $7k+ now. The image I posted was solid modeled in AutoCad 2004 I believe The materials for the solids were created using Autovision (obsolete now) and attached to the model and rendered in 3d studio Max all are AutoDesk products. Probably at that time the cost of the total software package was around $15k What we have now. AutoCad 2007a and 3D studio Pro and some engineering software to do things like finite element analysis and much more is about $25K

I am an engineer and designer in the oil fild equipment manufacturing industry. I started on Cad in the early 70, I have worked with Catia, Unigraphics, Solid Works and Pro E. since 1974. The university I graduated from was involved in the development of Unigraphics for MacDonald Douglas I was fortunate enough to get in to the program while it was in it's infancyMichaelP39022.9967476852

So Michael, what are you using now for D design? Inventor or something better/different? (please excuse my ignorance, I've been away from the industry for a couple of years and was still not versed well in all the options out there).

some times I miss sitting at the design desk for 8 hours of the day, but mostly not. I worked in a steel fab shop for 6 years, learned the inventor from release (build )3 up to 6.5 (I think or was it 6.3) till two years ago. Now their up to version .

I still have Acad2002 on disk and it works just fine for the limited drawing and design work I do now, although sometimes I miss the cool D imaging and making the models move just to see how it will work. But mostly not

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"There's really no wrong way, as long as the results are what's desired." Charles Fox

"We have to constantly remind ourselves what we're doing....No Luthier is putting a man on the moon!" Harry Fleishman

"Generosity is always different in the eye of the person who didn't receive anything, but who wanted some." Waddy Thomson

Oh and Doug,

Here is a link to a site with several different free cad programs. Knock yourself out or do a google search for freeware cad programs, lots to choose from.Rod True39023.081712963

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My Facebook Guitar Page

"There's really no wrong way, as long as the results are what's desired." Charles Fox

"We have to constantly remind ourselves what we're doing....No Luthier is putting a man on the moon!" Harry Fleishman

"Generosity is always different in the eye of the person who didn't receive anything, but who wanted some." Waddy Thomson

I use Rhino for both 2 and 3D drawings. I have occasionally imported the parts into Maya to render (the realism of the Maya renderer is MUCH higher than the Rhino rendering engine).

I also use Rhino to work out inlays. It's very useful because you can import an image as a "background bitmap", and basically trace over it to give you your inlay pattern.

I do a little bit of CAD here and there...   

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John Watkins
CNC Guitar Parts

We are on Autocad 2007, we have the AutoDesk partnership contract were we receive the updates the day of release and we test Bata versions. We looked at Inventor but was not really that impressed We still use 3D Studio Pro for animation and rendering and Pro E for Engineering analysisMichaelP39023.385775463

Reflective Brass is one of the hardest materials or skins to replicate well...Nice job John

Here is the full guitar I did for Bruce


MichaelP39023.3835069444

That's all pretty cool stuff! I'm a pencil and paper man myself...

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Todd Rose
Ithaca, NY

https://www.dreamingrosesecobnb.com/todds-art-music

https://www.facebook.com/ToddRoseGuitars/

WOW, all very nice. Wish I had the Money, but I'll head over to the free site that Rod posted. Again, nice stuff guys.

Here is a prime example of how I use 3D rendering to help a client design their guitar. This is from the Narra/Carp commission that went out this week. In the early stages the client wanted to know what his rosette look like. He gave me the specs and I modeled it. This is a pretty low resolution as compared to what I could do. but gets the effect across to the client. I find it a very useful tool.


Here is the final results. the client changed from 1/4" Koa segments to 3/8" segments and a wider inner ring of abalone
MichaelP39023.5730092593

[QUOTE=MichaelP]

I am an engineer and designer in the oil fild equipment manufacturing industry. [/QUOTE]

We have something in common.

Nothing fancy just 2-D plan type stuff for bracing patterns, templates, etc.. I use autocad LT, it's all I can afford.

Marc39023.678587963

Love this place!