After receiving our red tag certification during week one, we got straight to work on a prototype for our guitar. On our first day in the shop, we constructed a rough design for the neck and headstock. We took inspiration from the sloped headstock design of last year's Guitar project, which will allow the strings to sit tightly on the fretboard. 

In week three, we met with Matt Ritter from the Biological Sciences department at Cal Poly. He does a lot of woodworking in his spare time, so he was able to share his experience with us and critique our work. He gave us the idea to switch to Mahogany and Spruce for our final project in order to allow the sound to resonate within the box guitar. SO, Colin visited Matt Ritter's shop later in the week to continue discussing our design process and pick up some spruce and mahogany scraps for the face and body of our guitar. 

In week four, we finished gluing together the box body of our guitar and began testing the prototypes of our tuning pegs. Pete designed the tuning pegs with a notch for the string to slide into, which the string will then wrap around and cinch around itself as you tighten the peg. The concept is great and likely what we will use for our final piece, but the notch on this particular peg was not holding the string in place, so we couldn't get the string to tighten enough to play.

Reaching the halfway mark in the quarter, we were officially able to get a string attached to our prototype. Monday night, we worked on installing four frets on the top of the fretboard. On Tuesday, we installed a single tuning peg on the headstock and drilled a thin hole through the bridge of our Guitar, which will allow us to insert the string through and give somewhere for the ball end of the string to anchor onto. Unfortunately, we overtightened our string and snapped it, but we were able to capture a video of the guitar playing before the incident.

Entering the latter half of the quarter, we began working on a second neck made from mahogany. We got several frets in place using wood glue on Monday night, and installed several more Tuesday morning. However, a few of Tuesday's frets came loose as we switched to using epoxy rather than wood glue. We are unsure if we simply hadn't used enough epoxy, hadn't allowed it the proper time to cure, or if there was some other type of user error that led to this failure, but we intend to try again in the next shop. We were, however, able to test a new tuning peg designed by Pete, which not only functions well, but looks much cleaner than our previous designs. This new tuning peg is a bolt secured with a nut on the top of the headstock. It is tightened with a wrench, with a small hole through the nut to loop the guitar string through and a small screw drilled into the top of the bolt for the string to wind around.

In the week 7 labs, we began to finalize our prototype before we began our final project. Colin and Nick worked on installing the fret wire into our latest neck design on Monday night, while Nic and Colin began to replicate Pete's tuning peg design on Tuesday morning. The fret wire installation was much more successful than our last neck, as they are much more even in height, and the spacing is more accurate. For the tuning pegs, we used hex bolts with a longer shank so that the threads weren't inside the headstock, preventing it from raising or lowering when tightening it. Instead, the threads begin right where the bolt comes out of the headstock, allowing us to use a Nut to tighten it down. We are using the band saw to trim the bolts down to size, and the drill press to drill a small hole inside the bolt. We then will insert small screws which the strings will wrap around as we tighten the tuning peg. 

As the end of the quarter approached, work was kicked into overdrive. With an expected successful end to the quarter, things began to go south. As we were tuning up the guitar with all 6 strings, the rear bridge exploded due to the pressure. This called for an immediate redesign where the strings are initially inserted into the guitar. After many bridges breaking under the strings' pressure, we finally settled on a successful piece that could withstand the pressure of the strings. With excitement in our bones about the project, Nick decided to give the instrument a sweet paint job with our successfully built instrument. To continue, Professor Schwartz purchased a guitar neck on Amazon with the intention of making a concrete mold out of the neck so mass production of accurate fret placement could be easily achieved. We began by creating a box for the neck to sink into the concrete.  The concrete stuck surprisingly well, and a successful first mold was created.