The story of Älgen guitar: how to mix traditional hand-craft woodwork with cutting-edge digital fabrication

This talk will take a look at Älgen, a custom-built guitar that is a fusion of traditional hand-crafted woodwork and advanced 3D-printing and generative-design techniques. The guitar is built using no less than 4 different types of 3D-printing, including 3D-printed aluminium. At the same time it sticks with traditional hand built woodwork for the playing surface, matching material with function.

This talk will focus on the design behind the guitar, looking at what you can do with generative design and 3D-printing, how to interface the old and new construction techniques (e.g., mating a walnut body with 3D-printed nylon sides), and how to decide what bits to do with which technique.

I’ll also show how I achieved this as an amateur maker: the aim is to show the audience that what seems like far-out construction is actually reachable by us mortals thanks to improvements in tooling and 3D-printing services.