You can’t please everyone. After all the years of design and sweat and tears to make a super-light guitar, there just has to be someone who comes along and asks “Can you make it heavier?”. There is a general belief in the guitar world, supported by some science, that a heavier guitar has better, or longer sustain. Les Paul’s original prototype “rail” guitar was just that, with a pickup made from an old phone, and as might be imagined it had very good sustain, though the design had a couple of drawbacks.

The Ridgewing guitar was designed to allow extremely light components to be assembled into a full-size guitar that was super-portable. The body is made up of two interconnecting “frames” that each closely mimic the size, weight, and morphology of a carbon-fiber tennis racquet. In fact, we are in discussions with a tennis racquet manufacturer about making Ridgewing body frames through their existing tennis racquet blow-molding manufacturing process.

An issue that arises with making a super-light guitar body is that, for balance, the neck and headstock need to be super-light as well. The original suite of Ridgewing prototypes had solid carbon-fiber and epoxy necks made with a wet-layup process. Creating the tooling for making ultra-light hollow carbon-fiber necks was just a little beyond our budget and the capacity of our little shop, and for these early prototypes we were more concerned with form and fit. These necks were significantly heavier that even traditional wooden necks.

In addition to the prototype neck being heavy, the Ridgewing’s self-tuning headstock with the built-in Tronical system was also quite a bit heavier than the basic headstock, its core body being CNC’ed aluminum. So if you really wanted a self-tuning Ridgewing prototype with light carbon-fiber body and grills, you also needed a submarine captain’s hat to follow where the guitar wanted to go when you were playing.

One fix was to use solid aluminum body frames, but these were non-trivial to procure. An alternative scheme was to add counter-weights to the rear end of the carbon-fiber body frames.

The first step was to make a set of “hangers”, here cut from aluminum, which had a set of holes around the outer edge matching the screw pattern of the grills.

These hangers can be made out of just about anything, and are general-purpose adapters for easily and quickly creating precisely fitting new insert designs or other kinds of functional layers to the back of the guitar, which are then attached with the same M3 screws as for the grills, but longer as needed.

A pair of brass counterweights were cut out of some scrap 6mm brass stock we had that used to be the threshold for the front door of a bank.

These brass plates were then screwed to the aluminum hangers, and the hangers screwed on over the grill bosses with M3 screws that were 2mm longer than those used for the grills alone.

The result was a properly balanced self-tuning guitar, though with a peculiar techno design aesthetic that totally clashed with the organic fine grillwork it now slept with.

In the back of one’s mind it is comforting to remember that odd design explorations on a Ridgewing guitar can be quickly redacted with an Allen wrench.