Guitar Tuner Cutaway
7x scale model of the machine head on my tanglewood acoustic guitar, sliced in half to show the threads and gear mechanism
aprox. 250mm x 250mm x 250mm
A Molotow Liquid Chrome finish was used. It was the first time that I had worked with such a difficult finish and It took a lot of work to get close to a satisfactory result
The compound curves on this part were made by creating a solid buck from tooling board, and vacuum forming sheet styrene around it. i did this procedure twice and glued together the two forms
Many parts were turned from tooling board on a machine lathe
These parts utilised laser cutting technology as well as complex operations with a lathe and drill press
It took a lot of sanding and filling to make the parts look truly seemless
3D printed threads were inserted into the model
Some small complex parts were 3D printed
The chrome finish caused me a lot of problems as I had never used it before this
The chrome finish was very finicky, but I learned a lot about how to use it for the future
The machine head went through many design iterations as I tried to find an interesting plane to open up a cutaway
I designed multiple display ideas with 3D CAD software. The ‘ice block’ look really stood out to me but it was going to be very expensive and impractical to execute, so I opted for a simple display stand instead.
The real tuner
I designed and rendered digital copies of the real life machine head to help me with the design of the physical model
The real gears
Rendered copies of the tuner
This model was made as part of my second year at COGC. The brief was to design and create a model that represented a cutaway for a real-life object. I chose to recreate the guitar tuners on my acoustic Tanglewood guitar. I measured the individual parts to create digital models and assemblies of the object. This allowed me to experiment with slicing the model in different ways to find an interesting cutaway. I ended up cutting it on a plane that ran the length of the tuner shaft, perpendicular to the worm gear. Many different techniques were used to make this mode, including laser cutting & etching, turning, shaping between profiles, SLA and FDM 3D printing and vacuum forming.