After a couple years of sitting on a new design idea for a guitar tremolo I finally built a prototype to test the main mechanism. It worked as expected! I had an experienced guitarist check it out, he loved it! Here is my dilemma. I have practically zero money to invest in it so my thinking is I'll skip the patent thing and start making them by hand myself. I made the prototype out of aluminum using JB Weld to join pieces. My thinking was that aluminum would be a poor choice of materials for sound quality but its not bad. It would be sweet if I could make these out of mainly aluminum. I have no clue which way to go as far as welding/brazing, cheaper would be awesome. There is a good deal of force involved with a tremolo, as much as 250lbs of force in some circumstances. The pieces involved in being fastened together would vary in thickness from 3/16 to 1/2. I've seen these nifty looking brazing rods in videos that make it sound like they are better then welding but I don't know. One of the pieces I may be better off casting. Any experts on fastening aluminum here that could help a brother out? Any sort of welder that I could build myself cheap?
can you send a sketch showing what size parts get joined and how they are arranged. you don not have to sketch the exact parts if your worried about someone using your idea. I just need to know what size part gets joined to another part and where the forces are applied. 250 lbs of force can translate into a lot more on a joint depending on where it is applied in relation to the joint., and I have no idea what this device is used for or what it does. :?:
My free cad program has some bugs at the moment so let me see if I can describe one of the joints. For example a 1&1/2" by 1/4" upright piece connected to a plate 3/16" thick laying flat, say like a 2x4 standing upright on a floor. The force would be sideways, approx 125lbs max. Writing that just made me think, I need to punch a whole in the plate and sink upright piece into it.
