One of the keys to making an affordable Ridgewing guitar was to move to a die-cast metal process, actually die-cast magnesium to be precise. In the die-cast process liquid metal is injected into a die, much like plastic molding, where it cools enough to have sufficient strength to be removed from the mold. Making die-cast grills presented a problem.  The original Chrysalis grill design, which the new Ridgewing guitar was designed to use, was composed of two different grillwork design models, the “bold” and the “fine”, that were superimposed to create the final design. The bold grillwork was structural and passed the stress from the bridge to the outer body frame, though it was made light enough to “flutter” like an acoustic guitar soundboard.  The fine grillwork was designed to carry the vibrations of the bridge and spread it across the face of an inflated Mylar balloon to create an acoustic guitar tone. The problem with die-casting the fine grillwork was that the fine grillwork was just too narrow to squirt liquid magnesium through.  It had to be re-designed to be “fatter”.

When the Chrysalis guitar was re-launched as the Ridgewing guitar, it had been re-branded as a purely electric instrument, as the whole acoustic function of the original Chrysalis guitar design, despite the fact that it worked pretty well, was just too strange, alien even, for the average guitar player to get their head around. In the Ridgewing design, without the need for acoustic functionality, the grills no longer needed their fine grillwork, except for appearance’s sake, and they were pretty. The design problem now became how to make a grillwork design that lacked the fine grillwork, still retro-fit perfectly into the Chrysalis/Ridgewing body design, but still looked pretty. This was a non-trivial task. Skipping right to the end of the design journey, the above rendering shows a headstock’s view of a Ridgewing body, with the original Chrysalis grill design on the left treble side, and the new Ridgewing metal grillwork design on the right. Both rendered as polished gold, well, because gold. Here are top views of the Chrysalis and new Ridgewing bass grills:

Do I miss the fine grills? Absolutely. They were made to look like someone had dropped a pebble here and there into a very deep and still guitar pond. But the new design will be robust and still catches the eye, and because it is magnesium you can take scrapings and start a camp fire in the rain. Not many guitars can do that. And you can always upgrade later to the carbon fiber Chrysalis design.