Tech: Custom Luthiery Parts Maybe

Subject: Tech: Custom Luthiery Parts Maybe
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 05:40 AM

Bill Machrone reports in a recent PC Magazine article the startup company eMachineShop, where you can download a "powerful yet straightforward CAD program" to design objects. You then specify the material and submit your design to the site, and eMachineShop will price it according to the materials and machining or forming difficulty, along with the number of steps involved in manufacturing and finishing. The available materials range from every imaginable kind of plastic to metals such as aluminum, brass, and steel. You can specify bending, drilling, milling, turning, and various other operations. You can also specify finishes, including plating and powder coating.

The eMachineShop software prices your job on the spot, while the 3D rendering is on your screen. You find out what your part or run of parts will cost you in minutes, not days. When you give the okay, eMachineShop makes your parts and ships them to you. It's a full-capability fabrication facility that you pay for on an as-needed basis. Customers have created both simple and complex parts; you can see some photos on the site.

The same guy has also created the Web site Pad2Pad, where you can design your circuit board with simple downloadable software, place parts, run traces, spot holes, and connect layers. Like eMachineShop, Pad2Pad prices your work in advance and actually assembles the boards from a large inventory of parts instead of delivering solder-ready boards.

Circuit boards currently have a limited number of parts available, but can provide solder pads and holes for your own installation of specialized components.

Machrone comments:

I tried a simple circuit, the heart of a distortion pedal for electric guitar. It took me less than an hour to learn the software, lay out the circuit board, and place the parts. Pad2Pad then told me how much the board would cost for 2-, 4-, or 15-day delivery. Start-up costs and quantity discounts are built-in, and with a simple design like mine, ten boards cost only about twice as much as one.

A one-off board is fairly expensive; you'd have to want it badly. But the quantity prices quickly become very reasonable. Suddenly, that 25- or 100-piece manufacturing run seems quite feasible, even tempting. As you increase the number of boards in your order, the number of days for delivery inches up, but you can always pay a premium for fast turnaround.

Designing a part to be machined by eMachineShop is harder, because you have to work in three dimensions. I chose to duplicate a small brass part that I'd recently made on my benchtop milling machine, and I could almost have made one in the time I took to draw it. But if you take shipping costs and a black oxide-plated finish into account, eMachineShop wins hands down when you want quantities.

The developer, Jim Lewis, says: " As Amazon is to books I want to be to manufacturing."

(Jim Lewis is also the developer of a DOS program, Tornado Notes, which evolved into the Windows-based personal information manager and freeform database Info Select. Machrone comments: "Now up to version 8, Info Select is still my favorite environment for note taking and instantaneous retrieval of anything")

I haven't looked at the sites yet, but maybe some of those really hard-to-find luthiery parts could be made to order, or some of us might actually build that "innovative new instrument" we couldn't get parts for.

I wonder what a "custom made" fipple head would cost me…

John