Learning a New Craft on Purpose
February 11, 2026
Neither of us had ever built a guitar. That was the point.
We took on the electric guitar project as a way to learn something completely outside our usual work. Building instruments has its own vocabulary, its own tolerances, and a few hundred years of opinions about what makes a good one. We wanted to see how much of our engineering process would carry over and where it would fall apart.
What carried over
Modeling everything first paid off right away. We built the whole guitar in CAD before touching wood, including the electronics cavity, the neck pocket, and the pickup routes. Every hour spent there saved several in the shop.
Designing around the process carried over too. We wanted to show what laser cutting could do, so the body was built from individually cut layers laminated together. Thinking in layers from the start shaped every decision, from the outline to how the layers stacked up.
What did not
Some knowledge only lives in people's hands. Fret work, setup, and string action are not things you can fully model. We read a lot, watched a lot, and still had to redo steps. That was humbling in a useful way.
Wood also does not behave like the materials we usually spec. It moves with humidity, the grain changes how it cuts, and two pieces from the same board can act differently. We ended up placing the solid wood pieces in the hexagon pattern by hand so the grain would show the way we wanted.
Why we do projects like this
Clients hire us to solve problems we have not seen before. The only way to get good at that is to practice being a beginner. Every new material or process we learn makes us faster the next time something unfamiliar shows up.
The guitar plays. It has a custom laser engraved acrylic cover over the electronics, and it is one of a kind. More importantly, we came out of it knowing how to pick up a new craft quickly and honestly, which is a skill we use on almost every project now.