check that picture out -- you'll notice under the bass strings, there's extra relief CNC cut into the frets on 5-7th strings.

I must respectfully disagree.

Coming up with the ideas is daydreaming. The result of that daydreaming may be expanded (in which case it becomes science fiction) or distilled (in which case it becomes a hypothesis). Dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of people daydreamed of space travel before the "Space Age" began. Inventing on the basis of a daydream is a significant part of the total work, but—take it from me—invention only reveals the mountain of work which lies ahead.

Getting the completed idea into a product, including planning and setup, is rocket science. It is precisely such rocket science (e.g. the Rocket Equation) which created—and therefore defined—the "Space Age" (NASA has some fun reading from a contemporary perspective).

I understand that, as a musician, the more purely creative aspects of product development may hold more significance for you. However, the beauty of humanity is that anyone can be creative: the tyranny of reality is that far fewer people will ever actually create what they have imagined, and only a tiny fraction of those people will see any significant benefit as a result of what they created.


EDIT: I am making both literal and figurative use of the phrase "rocket science" to underscore my point.

By "one-cut bass relief depression", I mean to say that the elongated oval "valley" for the larger vibrational excursions of the lower bass strings is cut in "one fell swoop" along the collective Rail tips on a CNC milling machine.

Likewise, the remaining flat plane of all the Rail tips is made in one straight cut. This is a reliable machining method of shaving the tips collectively to precise heights.

Also, there were earlier more mechanical ways of cutting duplicate shapes before CNC. My first production of six Sticks was copied from my own #101 by a local gunstock fabricator. The "feeler" held my original and six more neck beams were copied by the cutter. The CNC precision wasn't there but I had all the basic dimensions and shape that I needed to get started.

Why didn't I continue that way? We discovered that the neck was too long for the fixtures and carving process. The Sticks were flexing and vibrating, creating irregular circular marks from the cutting tool.

Emmett explains this nicely in the State of the Stick discussion - skip to minute 20:00 where you can hear it in his own words.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQiYcnDQrtE[/youtube]

There is also a nice bit on intonation at 17:30 - very concise explanation of how to site a good set up.

I think we mean basically the same. Have in mind I am no native English speaker, so my way of express myself may be a little backwards. Of course I don't talk about daydreaming, I talk about creating. But creating and producing are two different things. There goes the rocket...

It was difficult to decide how to interpret your writing, since you are both non-native and seemingly close to fluent in casual expression.

Another CNC related technology is 3D Printing and this seems on its way to change a lot in a near future. One example: I just heard about ways to use 3D Printing to "grow a backup heart" for a person! By Tomography/CATscan a three dimensional blue-print of the organ is created and loaded into a 3D printer and then a copy of the heart is created. Then cells from the person are DNA modified into "believing they are heart-to-become cells" and applied to start growing on the 3D modelled heart. The point here is that the 3D printed heart clone is built from a material that disappears when "colonised" by organic cells. The technical challenge that is still to solve is how to apply enough blood vessels inside the heart so the new muscle cells will be fed well from day one until it's time to take over the original heart's job on location. Isn't this an amazing project! It's fun to imagine what effects this might bring to society in general; my guess is that crime and corruption will spontaneously die off as individuals then will live for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Any bad behaviour will definitely hit back and bite your ass and the typical young and irresponsible individuals will be a small minority (not as today, the majority as people tend to die at the time they wise up).

Sorry for going off topic, but I thought that since this thread reached a good conclusion so early it wouldn't hurt to round it off with a little daydream injection.

so the tip of the rails underneath those strings is slightly lower than the rest? (sorry - I can barely, if at all, see any difference from that picture)

The answer to the question is yes.

Imagine this.

-You have 10 string instrument laying flat on its back
-They are all the same gauge
-You can set them all at the same height

Now imagine (reality actually) this and suppose that you still wanted to have all the strings set to the same height

-There are 2 larger strings towards to the center of the fretboard

-In order to prevent the larger strings from making impact on the frets and respect the requirement that the strings must stay at the same height, you need to decrease the height of the rails under the larger strings.

I would really suggest that you watch the State of the Stick video (Gene = redundant) as Emmett explains this and uses very helpful hand gestures that explain why the instrument was made this way.

hah!
me understands now