While cleaning out a neglected corner of my shop this morning, under a bench I happened upon a dusty old blue cardboard tube that I had forgotten existed.  Inside were a set of the first drawings I ever made of the pre-Ridgewing Chrysalis Guitar when it had first formed in my imagination some 35 years ago.

Putting anything down on paper has always been a struggle. Drawing a straight line or writing legibly have always been just about impossible. In 3^rd grade my classmates were allowed to upgrade from those big yellow pencils to a fountain pen (ballpoint pens not yet invented) when we could pass a writing neatness test. I remember trying mightily all year and being dead last. From as far back as I can remember my mind was always full of inventing things, but I couldn’t draw or write them down, and could only get them out of my head and into the real world by trying to build them directly. My Maker skills were all self-taught, which meant that my first attempt at building any of my imaginings almost never worked, and feeling failure, as no one had taught me that Rev 1 of anything almost always fails and leads to Rev 2, etc., I moved on to the next.

The only two things I kept at until they worked reliably were multi-engine, multi-stage model rockets that I built with a friend of mine, and quite powerful warheads for them which I created myself that detonated on impact with a dangerously loud BOOM, threw shrapnel and burning embers in all directions and raised a very nice mushroom cloud. This was around 1960, when everyone was pretty sure there was going to be a nuclear war with Russia, and we did “duck-and-hide-under-your-desk” drills at school to prepare (yes, really). Nuclear mushroom clouds were deeply imprinted on all our psyches, so figuring out how to make my own was deeply satisfying.

I moved on to model airplanes, again being unable to make drawings to build from, so every project was like play-dough. Learning in high school how to type on an old Remington manual solved the illegible handwriting problem, but it wasn’t until I started learning guitarmaking in my 20’s that I learned how to draw meaningful straight lines with a ruler, because I couldn’t lay out a guitar design without them. I still struggled with curves, both imaging and creating them. The way I found to create the curves I needed for a guitar design was backwards from what most people do, which is to make a drawing of a desired shape and then make a template from the drawing.  I would first make the template free-hand, then trace its edge. On a band saw I would cut out a thin piece of plywood to the approximate shape I wanted, then file and sand down the outer edge curve until it looked and felt right running my hand around it. Finally, when satisfied, I would trace this curve with a pencil.

By 1982 I had been building guitars independently for several years, and then this strange new guitar erupted in my imagination, and wouldn’t let go. I had no trouble designing it there. It was natural and effortless to go into technical daydream mode, flip on the inner lights, and go to work where I had left off the previous session. The problem came along when the basic design was pretty much done, but it was all in my head, and I had no way to get it out and into anybody else’s head. I saw that learning to draw was my only recourse. The local community college had an introductory course in technical drafting, so I signed up and took a semester’s worth. It was a revelation. By the end I could create passible 3D perspective drawings, and draw, or at least aspire to draw the kind of block letters real engineers use.

In late 1983 I began to try to make drawings of this strange guitar floating around in my head, so I could show it to other people. It took me a couple of months with a lot of erasing, but the result were these drawings.

The drawing above showed the basic plan of the instrument as constellation of interchangeable modules held together by the strings’ tension, which was controlled by a lever in the back of the headstock.

This was my first imagining of the assembled instrument. I was already thinking of carbon fiber, so it was drawn dark. 

Looking more closely you can see that the two halves of the body were integral rather than being comprised of separate frames and grills. The grillwork was very 3-dimensional and organically swoopy, and very “thick” compared to the eventual final design- it was a complete mystery at the time what grillwork dimensions were needed.

Two different interchangeable bridges were envisioned, an electric bridge (with knobs) and a pure acoustic bridge, which differed in how they attached to the guitar body. The body frames were envisioned having multiple dovetail attachment points to be used as needed. The electric bridge had two extra female dovetail joints which engaged the frames on their mid-lines in addition to the outer attachment points, while the pure acoustic bridge only made contact at the outer attachment points.

The idea was that the central attachments to the frames proper would make the electric bridge more “solid” and provide more electric guitar-like sustain, while the acoustic bridge would be more free to “flutter” in order to create more acoustic sound.

The most difficult drawing was the guitar parts shown together in their minimum disassembled packing volume. While a proper packing pattern for the components would wait for a later day, the imagined overall packing volume turned out to be remarkably accurate.

It felt like a big achievement when the patent issued a couple of years later. Little did I know how small a step it would turn out to be.