Over the holiday break I picked my guitar back up again after a couple of decades and decided to start teaching myself to play the blues. And of course it ain’t as easy as Clapton makes it look, so as I expected I’ve got a couple of years of challenge ahead of me. But it’s a good challenge and one that I intend to master. I also started watching a few You Tube videos and discovered this guy whose name is Reggie (Guitaro5000) who gets set up on a street corner and puts up a sign that says “Come Singe with Me for Free”. Some of the people that he gets to sing with him are actually pretty good, but just the bravery of those that take him on is inspiring. What caught my eye was the fact that Reggie plays an Ovation guitar. And, for those of you that don’t know what that is, I’ve put a picture of one as the lead pic in this post.
The thing I hope you notice is that this looks very much like your traditional acoustic guitar, except that the back side of the main part of the guitar is not wood – it’s black and is actually a composite material. The original Ovation guitar had a wood soundboard (front of the guitar with the hole in it) and a parabolically shaped composite material back. Invented by Charlie Kaman (yes, that Kaman – Kaman Aerospace) he and a group of his enterprising engineers experimented with several different composite materials until they came up with what they called “Lyrachord”. This stuff is basically a loosely woven fiberglass in a thermoplastic resin that could be molded into the shape of the back side of a traditional dreadnaught guitar (Spanish style guitar) only rounded on the corners. Later on in the life of Ovation guitars, they even introduced one with a carbon fiber soundboard, so the entire sound box for those models is composite.
So this got me to thinking about whether or not a carbon fiber composite might just make a good material for making musical instruments. After all, you can get nearly any stiffness you want and in any direction you want just by tailoring the layup and messing with the properties of the plastic or resin you want to use. A google search revealed quite a bit about this, so I thought I would share some of what I learned with you all this week.
And, sure enough, there are people making carbon fiber acoustic guitars. This is a KLOS acoustic/electric guitar with Fishman pickup (tone/volume controls inside the sound hole) that has an all carbon fiber main body and a carbon fiber neck and fretboard. And this thing isn’t cheap either, it’s on the order of $2000 for the full size dreadnaught style guitar – the size that everyone uses (I have three of them, two steel string and one nylon).
And here’s the good part. These things sound pretty good. And from guitar to guitar they are very consistent in sound quality and tonal range. That is because the folks that have been making these for some time have figured out how to balance the tone of the guitar from the low tones to the high notes to have the overall tone from the guitar balanced. This is a feat that only the best luthiers making wood guitars are able to achieve, and only with guitars made all at about the same time with wood from the same trees used in a series of the same guitar.
This points out the overwhelming advantage of use of composites on consistency – however you want to measure it. By that I mean that you can dial in a set of properties whether they be mechanical or thermal or some other property, and as long as you control the process that you use to make whatever you are making (a high end acoustic guitar in this case) each one that you make will be as close to identical to the last one as is humanly possible.
The same cannot be said for more natural materials like wood. That is because the wood was not purposefully made just for being a soundboard in a guitar, its purpose was to hold up the tree it came from. Man has just used the average or general properties of the wood, as well as the process with which the wood was aged (dried) to enhance certain qualities of the wood to achieve something that would make a good sound board for instance. Whereas with carbon fiber and the right plastic matrix it is the composite designer that determines what properties the finished product will have. All you need to know is what stiffness and material density (both are important in making sound) you are looking for and where in the guitar you want that particular mix. Creative engineers have been doing this with light weight aerospace parts for decades, so making a guitar out of carbon fiber doesn’t seem to me like that much of a stretch.
There are several companies that have come and gone over the years making carbon fiber guitars and other musical instruments. KLOS (the guitar shown above) was founded in 2014 in Provo Utah by two brothers, one who graduated from Princeton and the other from Brigham Young. And they are still in business at least from what I was able to tell.
The Princeton grad is an electrical engineer and the Brigham Young grad is a mechanical engineer. Both of them are avid guitar players, and both of them have the engineering skills to pull this off. These guys also make Mandolins, Electric guitars, Bass Guitars, and Ukeleles, all from carbon fiber / epoxy composites. I would imagine that my friends at Hexcel probably know these guys and may even be supplying them with the raw materials to make their guitars.
Another company that is still in business making carbon fiber guitars is Emerald Guitars in Donegal, Ireland. They make a range of different guitars, from entirely acoustic (with the sound hole in a sort of an interesting place), acoustic/electric hybrid, and some rather odd things including a guitar / harp combination. Sort of like the dual necked guitar that Led Zeppelin’s lead guitarist Jimmy Page played in some songs (6 string neck and 12 string neck on same guitar – Gibson EDS-1275) - notably on Stairway to Heaven.
Emerald was started by another guitarist / engineer / craftsman / composite material specialist, Alastair Hay, who in 1994 was building carbon fiber Formula 1 racing boats for Seebold Racing in St. Louis when he got the idea to build a carbon fiber guitar. He returned to Ireland and in 1998 built his first carbon fiber acoustic guitar. Within a year he had decided to make this a career and founded Emerald Guitars. After having gone through some tough times – pretty normal for a startup especially one as innovative and mold breaking as Emerald is – they have bounced back and now have a state of the art facility in Donnegal where they even have a guitar gallery.
As of April of last year, they hit 10,000 guitars made in Donegal by Emerald. I imagine that these guys are also going to be around for some time. The pic above is just a few examples of things that they make and/or have made in the past.
Even the big boys, meaning Martin and Gibson in the guitar world, have toyed and experimented with carbon fiber for guitars, so it appears that carbon fiber guitars are going to be around for some time and will gain in popularity as the price of carbon fiber comes down and the availability of fine hardwoods to make new wood guitars gets more and more difficult to source.
What about natural fibers for guitars, and also what about other musical instruments – can they also be made using composite materials? The answer to both of these questions is unarguably yes. And since I’m really on something of a sustainability rant these days, I think it is probably appropriate to start with natural fibers and their use in guitars. The picture above is a compilation of images of Blackbird Guitars musical instruments. On the left is their flagship 6-string acoustic guitar the Savoy, the middle pic is the back side of this same guitar showing the same sort of parabolic curvature as the Ovation carbon fiber guitar, and on the right is their Clara ukelele. All of these instruments are made entirely using flax fiber. This is an interesting company that I did not know was associated with another natural fiber composites company that I have written about that is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area – Lingrove Composites. Lingrove actually grew out of Blackbird Guitars. Initially Blackbird was making carbon fiber guitars, but since the founders of the company were located in the Bay area and were inherently environmentalists, they decide to try to make a material that would have the same sound properties as wood, only from natural and renewable resources. They chose flax fiber for some obvious reasons but had to search a bit for a good enough resin to use. The founder of Blackbird Guitars, Joe Luttwak, and the founder of Entropy Resins, Desi Banatao formed Lingrove, LLC to further develop their flax fiber and sustainable epoxy made from industrial waste to create Ekoa® which is the material you see in the guitars and ukeleles above. Entropy resins eventually got bought by the Gougeon Brothers of West System® epoxy fame, but the Lingrove folks are still in business and making not only flax fiber musical instruments, but also natural wood-like veneers and panels for building materials. They also sell Ekoa® as a pre-preg material and apparently even Rock West Composites is using it as the outer layer in their hockey sticks and parts of bicycle frames.
Before I go and quit writing about this stuff I thought I would leave everyone with another collage of images. All of these – with the possible exception of the spruce cello in the center of that group of 5 – are made of composite materials. I was especially interested in seeing the woodwinds (flute and bassoon) which are made using what is called Ebonite, which is a hard rubber composite invented as a substitute for Ebony wood. The black color – aside from the fact that it has a lot of particulate carbon – comes from the fact that the rubber is vulcanized for an extended period of time, increasing the sulfur content. And of course rubber is an aromatic with lots of sulfur atoms bonded into the 6-sided rings. Apparently they sound a lot like the wood equivalents. Watch out Ian Anderson – there’s a composite flute coming your way.
And, just so that all of you know, I am definitely not a natural at guitar, so even though I will never be as good as Clapton or Jeff Beck, or even some of the better blues guitarists that just play at clubs, at some point I intend to be good enough to hold my own at social gatherings of family and friends. Music is always welcome and a great way to liven up that part of your brain and keep your creative juices flowing.
That’s about it for this week. I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. As usual I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – as well as on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives.
My second book is now in the hands of my publisher, with just one thing left for me to do. Most of you know that it is about what I have been writing in these newsletters for the last 6 months or so – sustainability of composites and a path to the future that does not include using fossil fuels for either the raw materials or the process energy to make composites. The title of the book, at least for now, is “Close the Circle, A Roadmap to Composite Materials Sustainability.” It truly is a roadmap which I hope that at least at some level the industry will follow. Only time will tell.
Finally, I still need to plug my first book, so here’s the plug. The book pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available last August and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon, except that I charge $8 shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here’s a picture of the book.
And, I promise, as soon as my next book actually gets to the point where we have worked out all the details on the cover, this image will change a bit. Our daughter, Candace, already has a prototype drawn up that went to my publisher. I think it’s going to be fabulous.
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