This transparent wireframe of an assembled Ridgewing guitar is best viewed at high resolution, or zoomed in. Interesting things start to appear.

Here is a nice little mystery. What’s with this hook? I did this design a couple of years ago, and I had forgotten about this detail – one of those late night inventions. Here is a hint:

There is another hook at the back end too! Hmmm….

Let’s move it up a notch with surface rendering with some strategic transparency:

Yup, definitely a hook. And the back end too. Hmm….

Some background – Around the time I did this design, there was a raging debate in the shop as we approached shipping our first finished Ridgewing prototype. The debate had to do with fabric, specifically outfitting the guitar frames with Velcro around the outer edge to allow the attachment of decorative fabric backs. I knew from selling the original Chrysalis guitars years before that adding cool-looking reflective fabrics to the back of the guitar that you could see through the grillwork was a very nice touch, and opened up a whole new design space for the guitar. But the guys wouldn’t have it. They had spent months working towards this moment, and to them this first Ridgewing guitar they had made was sleek and black and beautiful, and they were not going to allow fuzzy Velcro to be put around the edges. The Horror!!

Some background from another area – the fact that the Ridgewing guitar’s open frame design didn’t have a back was disconcerting to some players. They were used to feeling the hard back of their guitars rubbing against their belt buckle, and a guitar without a back – well, it just didn’t feel like a complete guitar. To create an option that would satisfy such players, I designed a pair of carbon fiber shells that would fit on the back of the body frames, screwed right on the same hard points as the grills.

The two shells attached separately to the two body frames so the body could still come apart, and they were pretty low profile so the guitar equipped with them could still fit in a regular Ridgewing case.

While this created a rigid, sleek and beautiful back to the guitar, the problem was that it looked terrible from the front as a visual background for the grills. If you have ever seen carbon-fiber molded anything, one side is beautiful and shiny, like here on the side facing the guitarist’s belt buckle, but the back side is rough. Black grills are cool looking and really “pop” against a fabric background, but they look like shiny cobwebs against the back shells’ “B-side”. So, what to do?

As is so often the case, I found the solution by going into space, this time to the moon to be precise, and back 45 years in time. Stay with me here.

I had grown up with the space program since grade school in the 1950’s. I knew the names of all the astronauts and watched every launch, while normal kids watched baseball and collected player cards. For 15 years there was this huge national goal being pursued to get astronauts to the moon and plant the US flag there before the Russians, and in July 1969 we did it.

Now, it was very important from a patriotic perspective to plant an American flag on the moon, but there was a small problem – there is no air on the moon – so any flag you put up there will just droop in a very un-masculine way, and waiting for a breeze is unproductive. It was realized that having the astronauts salute a droopy American flag once they got the moon, after all the years, lives, sweat, tears and billions and billions of dollars it had taken to get there, just wouldn’t do. The solution was to give the moon flag some Viagra in the form of a wire stiffener along the top of the flag that made it stand out in a proper patriotic manner.

So I began to wonder if maybe this same moon flag stiffener trick could be used to solve the guitar fabric problem. I realized that a piece of spring steel wire could be shaped to “click” into place between the grillwork and the back shell of each half of the guitar body, which would be sewn into the edge of whatever decorative fabric one wanted to put in there. Solid back on the guitar? Check. No Velcro around the guitar body? Check. Ridgewing-style easy to put a decorative fabric “flag” in and take it out again? Check. Cheap? Check. Easy do make on a kitchen table using a coat hanger? Check. This started to look like a pretty good solution.

Making the 3D CAD model of the flag stiffener shown here was about as quick and easy as anything can be. It was also pretty quick to bend a piece of steel piano wire I had to the right shape. The trick to getting it to easily “click” into place was to leave the overall curve a bit relaxed and to bend the ends to fit between the first and last pairs of screw bosses. The mysterious little J-hooks that showed up in the original “X-ray” were for safety, so you couldn’t poke yourself or someone else in a sensitive spot. If the fabric were properly sewn into the right shape, the sprung steel wire would hold it taught and flat, and all you would have to do is push the half-guitar-shaped flags into each side from the middle when the body was apart. Click Left. Click Right. Assemble. Play.