Here you can see some good detail on an interesting Ridgewing guitar configuration. Die-cast aluminum body frames, carbon fiber grills, neck and bridge, and rosewood fingerboard. If you ever need to clear an exit path through an ugly bar fight, this is the guitar to have. Use it whole to clear a comfortable wide swath, or pop the neck off, and you have a pretty good tomahawk for carving a narrower path.

The rear view on the right shows how the grills attach to the back of the body frames – eleven M3 stainless steel cap screws around the treble side perimeter, and thirteen on the bass side. Putting a brass washer under each one looks very sharp. Though the grills themselves look like a complicated alien life form, it is all actually a very simple arrangement. The screws are two inches apart, and provide redundancy in case one or more attachments get broken or screws lost. You can easily take out every other screw, and it will hold together just fine. You can use other interchangeable body inserts in place of the grills that use different subsets of the whole screw attachment pattern, though it is probably prudent to stick with a majority. If you look closely on the upper part of the back side, you can see some unused screw holes peeking through the grill on the “flying buttresses” that connect the neck pocket to the waist. Unlike the carbon fiber body frames which use threaded brass inserts to anchor the strings, in these aluminum frames the M3 screw holes are tapped directly into the surface.

Note that the grills get close but don’t touch the frames along the mid-line. Also, and it is hard to see, but the bridge doesn’t touch the frames either – it is quite literally a bridge connecting the grills on either side without touching anything in the middle. While a typical electric guitar has a nailed-down bridge that is good for sustain, the Ridgewing “floating bridge” configuration allows the bridge and grills to vibrate from the input of the strings, just as the soundboard of an acoustic guitar is driven to vibrate. As has been told elsewhere, the Ridgewing’s predecessor Chrysalis guitar was designed as a purely acoustic instrument, and the carbon fiber grills and bridge system were designed to mimic the mechanical and vibrational properties of an acoustic guitar soundboard to drive a stretched Mylar membrane like a dragonfly wing to create sound. The newer Ridgewing design has kept the original Chrysalis grills, but has eliminated the acoustic Mylar membrane to be played as an electric.  As a result, the native tone of the Ridgewing guitar reflects the original mechanical properties of the Chrysalis guitar, and so is distinctly acoustic in flavor.

To look at the simplicity of the back side of the Ridgewing guitar is to see opportunity. Additional different functional or decorative layers can be stacked up behind the grills using the same attachment screws, with the only change required being longer M3 screws as needed. Such additional layers could include such things as an LED light show, built-in amp and flat speakers, or plastic or carbon-fiber back shells for those who like the feel of a smooth solid backside of their guitar against their tummy.