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The Amaero team is delighted to be awarded the 2022 Powder Metallurgy Design Excellence Award of Distinction - Outstanding Application of Powder Metallurgy - for our custom-designed guitar string tuner heads.
How we ended up making the skull and cross bone parts for a carbon-fiber guitar is an interesting story and is a huge credit to our team members Shon Dionne and Rod Soltero for championing the project and bringing it to life.
SCT or Sankuer Composite Technologies, Inc is a composite manufacturer operating in a number of industries, including racing (marine and auto), product development for auto OEMs, lightweight quality test fixtures and the development of their solid body carbon fibre guitar, RS427.
SCT’s owner Patrick Sankuer, was keen to incorporate AM into his product selection. After meeting Shon, they brainstormed how they could best demonstrate AM technology to SCT’s customers and ultimately settled upon SCT’s guitar platform.
There are several standard components on a guitar that can make a top-notch guitar feel ‘cheap’ including the plastic closeouts that surround the string pick-ups. Patrick’s initial request was to develop new closeouts using AI or Ti but these parts were too simple, and it did not demonstrate AM’s true value proposition. The next step was to explore customisation and we turned our attention to the standard tuner heads of a 6-string guitar.
The design criteria used was to keep a custom design within the envelope of a standard head. Several ideas were bandied about, but the winning idea was a skull and cross bone (Jolly Roger) design. A 3D model of an actual human skull was utilised as were simple dog biscuit bones as the crossbones. The design aligned well to the tuner heads and functioned well too. After the initial print, an iterative design change was made to use more realistic bones to achieve a ‘cooler’ more grotesque effect, also demonstrating the intricate detail that AM offers.
To say that we are chuffed to win this year’s design excellence award for the outstanding application of powder metallurgy is an understatement. This was a great project to work on and we are thrilled with the result.
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