One evening a couple of months ago, when i was looking at metalnecks.com, which links to a lot of aluminium guitars, it struck me that the majority of guitars have wooden bodies with aluminium necks or aluminium bodies with wooden necks. There were comparably few one-piece aluminium guitars. And no aluminium "neck-through"-necks with attached wooden "wings" at all. That puzzled me a bit, because it seems that among luthiers using wood, the neck-through design is widely considered the best overall solution.
I tried to imagine how an aluminium neck-through-neck would look. It might be made from a single long slab of aluminium. That would be very heavy, so you'd probably route out some of the material along the neck like the Kramer aluminium neck. Then you'd get something looking a lot like an aluminium T-beam. You know, these metal beams used for load bearing parts of houses among other things.
Why not use a stock T-beam? That'd be way cheaper than having the neck made from a big slab of aluminium on a CAM router. I think it can be done in the following steps.
You start out with at T-beam, which will act as sort of a spine in the guitar. A top flange of 100mm, a bottom flange of 60mm and 5 mm flange thickness (that will be approx 4, 2,4 and 0,2 inches) will be suitable. They are available, but - as it should turn out later - not exactly readily available.
The T-bar is cut to shape (Pickup holes, neck and head). Due to the width of the pickup holes, the T-bar has to be quite wide in order to keep its structural strength. With a narrower T-bar, the pickup holes would completely intersect the top flange, weakening the T-bar considerably.
Having modified the T-bar, you screw or glue on wings (like on a wooden neck-through guitar), fingerboard and some pieces of wood to give the neck its desired shape. Plus, of course, route out cavities for electronics, sand the body, mount bridge, nut, etc, etc.
This way, you get a guitar with a lot of structural strength from the T-beam. You have great freedom of choice of wood and shapes of the body. And best of all: It should be possible to do it with ordinary do-it-yourself tools (hand held router, metal saw, sand paper, electric drill, belt sander, etc.).
I think it will work. I think it will look amazing. I am not sure how it will sound, but I am going to build myself one. Then we shall see. Or rather hear.
I'll post updates on this blog. I've already done some designing and planning plus a couple of purchases. This will be described in separate posts in the near future, and I expect that when I get around to the actual construction of the thing, my posting will have caught up, and I'll be posting in more or less real-time.
13 comments:
Great Blog and Great designs. It good to see innovative guitar designers! Keep on blogging and designing.
Thanks! I will.
Interesting concept. I think the only problem you will have is adjusting the forward or backward bow of the neck because there is no truss rod. A guitar neck needs some forward bow to avoid fret buzz, this design would be perfectly flat.
You might have a point. I expect the neck to curve very slightly when the strings are on. If by then I can't get proper action by adjusting the bridge (and screws on the nut which I'm planning), then I'll probably have to install a truss rod on each side of the bottom flange.
Still, I'll try without truss rod and see how it works.
With such a radical concept as an aluminum neck, why not use the conductivity of the alumium to become the ground return in a low impedance, individual string pickup. It works like this. Connect the strings to a metal nut that is electrically connected to the aluminum neck. The neck acts as the common ground return along with the six hot connections behind the bridge. Insulated intonnation inserts need to be used to prevent the strings from shorting out.
Each string acts like the vibrating element of a ribbon microphone. A voltage is induced in each individual string when a magnet is placed near the strings. The string impedance is in the range of a fraction of an ohm to about 1 ohm. Use six 4 ohm to 10K or 20K or higher miniature transformers, one for each string. Wire each transformer low Z side to the heel of the neck as the common ground connection point and the other end to the string behind the bridge. The string acts like a one turn loop which actually has a voltage induced on it when vibrating in a magnetic field. The transformer turns ratio boosts the string output level to something that the amp can more easily use.
You can combine strings or have independent outputs to drive a midi converter or even have six separate outputs to send the guitar signal to a six-channel microphone mixer with independent volume, pan and EQ control of each string.
This is just some food for thought to extend the use of an aluminum neck into a very high fidelity guitar.
Enjoy
bbsailor
Fascinating idea!
I can see that my design lends itself well to the principle, but I assume it could be done by using the truss rod of a traditional electric guitar plus a length of cable under the pickguard, connecting to the bridge. Meaning that others also have the option of experimenting.
I know too little of electronics to acknowledge that it'd work. Has it ever been done? (if it hasn't, it's fun and interesting because it's new. If it has, on the other hand, it's more reassuring since you know it can function).
Alexander
Everything you need to know to try this idea is in the following two U.S. Patents by Martin Clevenger.
Patent 4408513 in 1863
Patent 4499809 in 1985
This patent will produce a pickup that has a very wide and rather flat frequency that has sort of an acoustic quality as more upper harmonics are produced compared to traditional guitar pickups with 5,000 to 10,000 turns of AWG42 wire.
bbsailor
OOPS
Patent 4408573 was issued in 1983.
bbsailor
Double OOPSE
My eyes are bad trying to copy off old notes. Sorry.
The real Clevenger Patent number is 4408513 in 1983.
bbsailor
I dont think there will be much neckbow if any. I've put together two longscale 10 string basses with alu-necks quite similar to this (but not as cleaver) with string gauges from .100, and i didn't notice any neckbow actually.
What i don't get is what you will do for frets? (mine was fretless)
Gary,
I'm glad to hear that it worked for you without further reinforcements of the neck. It sounds promising for my project.
I plan to use traditional frets in a rosewood fretboard glued on top of the t-beam, so that part of the guitar is fairly ordinary.
I love your enthusiasm but coming from a guitar lutherer its a bad idea. Here is why it is a waste of your time to make this.
The neck is a bow. It's supposed to bow. A perfectly strait neck would rattle or not play notes. The best necks, and most expensive produced by places like Guitar Factory in orlando, use a neck-though design. that way both ends of the string from head to bridge are on the same piece of wood, with the help of a truss rod, this happens to produce the most notes without rattle on a fretboard. It needs to be flexible.
Your idea could work if you make it thin enough to bow perfectly for a specific string gauge. But metal is effected greatly by temperature, body heat room temperature, indoors and outdoors would noticeably change its playability in different conditions. Even sunlight would effect it. Metal is used for temperature gauges because it expands so much in heat.
you could insulate it, hm.. in wood perhaps because wood is a fairly reasonable insulator and it happens to resonate well.
And you could make this metal neck out of tungsten because it is both hard and reacts mildly to normal temperature changes. Because it is harder you'd have to make it much smaller.
Guess what? someone beat you to the punchline over 100 years ago, it's called a Truss Rod.
But sadly, the truss rod got shortened to accommodate the shorter bolt-on necks.
If you made a truss rod extend from tuning pegs to the bridge then you'd be on to something! But good custom shops already do that. I already do that. :/
Sry man. glad you realized normal truss rods need change. Look up neck-through guitar designs. They are nearly perfect already, and they aren't all that hard to make.
Hi Jon
Thanks for the advice. As you can see, more than a year has passed since this first post. And nothing much has happened, to some extent due to the issues, which you mention.
I do expect the T-beam to bow a bit under the tension of the strings. If it’s not enough, I’ll have to use a weaker T-beam. You’re right about the truss rod, and I’ll probably have to use one to get the correct bow.
I did give the high termal expansion of aluminium some consideration. I've heard about problems with aluminium guitars expanding in the heat and becoming unplayable.
I don’t think insulating it will work. It couldn’t keep the guitar at the desired temperature for hours (which is what you’d need). I even considered building it to be perfect at a certain, relatively high, temperature (say 40 degrees Celsius), and keeping the guitar at that by electric heating elements and thermostats.
Tungsten sounds nice, but isn’t it brittle? …and expensive?
I’d have to make my own truss rod running the whole length of the guitar. It seems pretty straightforward. At least compared to the other tasks, I have. But on a traditional neck-through guitar, I am not sure it is necessary having the truss rod go all the way to the bridge. Wouldn’t the body provide more than enough stiffness in most cases?
/Alex
Post a Comment