Thursday, November 3, 2011

Miniature guitars manufacturing process

Incredibly, it's November and we're still perfecting the manufacturing process for our range of miniature instruments (starting with the micro guitars). We've got the PCBs made up and have placing and soldering the components down to quite a fine art - even if we're still doing everything by hand, until we've a working pick-and-place machine.

Soldering the multi-core cable is still quite a job to do by hand but we've got it down to about five-ten minutes per instrument, including testing and resoldering should any dry joints cause problems.

One of our bottle-necks is getting the guitar strings consistently the same length and all bent to the right angle(s). These finished guitars look ok, but if you examine them closely (around the bridge and neck positions) you'll see that on some, the guitar strings look a bit bent and wiggly.


While we had the laser cutter out, we made a simple jig for bending the wires.
We went through all the guitar designs and made sure that the holes for each lined up exactly then made a template for bending our wires.


As you can see, using the jig, all our guitar strings are now neatly lined up, all the same length, and all entering the guitar body at the same angle. Such a simple job - but it makes such a difference!

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