Foldable Guitar

~ This project is a work in progress ~

When my family travels, we often wish it was easier to transport our instruments. As a musically-inclined family, we enjoy singing and playing songs with our friends, but not everyone has a guitar or mandolin or bass on-hand, and taking a plane or long car-ride with one can be difficult. Guitars, while popular, are large and relatively fragile. And though so-called "travel guitars" have been made, they usually only involve a removeable neck, leaving players with a long neck and bulky body to transport and a poor-sounding instrument.

Could it really be that difficult to design and build a nice-sounding guitar that folds completely into an assortment of simple pieces that fit into a bag no larger than a laptop case?

Prototype 1: Proof of COncept

P1 video

I spent a week or so on developing some initial designs before realizing that all my ideas were dependent on a single concept I hadn't yet tested. For a guitar to be completely dismantled and then put together, the strings need to be tensioned and un-tensioned with ease. To explore this idea, I created a very simple prototype with two pieces of wood, a hinge, and some fishing line strings attached with screws. The strings start out loose, then are pulled taut when I use the smaller piece of wood as a lever.

Prototype 2: Main Ideas

Once I knew that I would be able to tension the guitar strings, I felt comfortable with moving on to a more involved prototype, with a full neck and body.

Neck Extension and Tensioning

String Tensioning and Locking

Cardboard Body to Wood

CAD Version 1: Basic Shape & Initial Structure

Using skills learned during my freshman year projects class, I modeled my guitar on a web-based CAD program called Onshape. This process has helped me improve