Gary Walters, full-time faculty for the ATAP program, has been fascinated with designing and manufacturing guitars for two years. He found it challenging at every stage. It starts on paper by sketching ideas—the conceptual design stage. It then moves to Artcam where the sketch is converted from pixels to vectors, commonly referred to as raster-to-vector. Then it’s exported to Cimatron for design in Solids, where many components are simultaneously designed and assembled using Solid Assemblies. Assembly mode allows for independent adjustments and enhancements without starting over each time—a tough yet valuable lesson learned several hundred hours into his first guitar project.
After a successful design phase, it’s time for manufacture. He found the biggest challenge in manufacturing was deciding how to hold parts. Therefore, many creative fixtures were necessary at various stages. CAM programming was the final step, where dozens and dozens of programs were developed and executed. This also tested his organizational skills.
Many skills are required in order to design and produce finished products of any sort. As fun as it is building guitars, these skills are applied to everything.