DeLuze Orphean Proposal
DeLuze Orphean
Table of Contents
John Ledet, Kevin Sullivan
Dear Sir or Madam,
We are both upcoming seniors at Stratford High School enrolled in the Academy of Science and Engineering (ASE). As our senior year approaches, we were both tasked with developing a project of whatever we desired until we graduate. We’ve both decided to design a Headless Guitar which is an electric guitar with the tuners at the base of the guitar. The motivation behind this project is influenced by our passion for guitars.
ASE is a class students apply for during their sophomore year at Stratford High School. If accepted into the class, students would attend the class during their junior and senior years. This class is project-based and every project students do is related somehow to science and engineering. Some of these projects include forensics, renewable energy, and architecture. Students studied fingerprinting, fiber tracing, blood splatter, and footprinting for our forensics unit. For our renewable energy project, we created an energy-producing kite that generates power through its zip-tied wind turbines. Our architecture unit included boat and miniature bridge designs. While Junior year focuses on various sciences with multiple projects, Senior year focuses on a single project that students choose to do until they graduate. Juniors first choose their senior projects by the end of the year and begin work during the summer. When our senior year ends, we will present our completed projects in class. The idea of senior projects is for students to find something that relates to their interests while evolving their engineering skills. We are both passionate about guitars and decided to do something that would relate to that subject. We both wanted to do a twist to the standard Stratocaster, but not something that would strive too far from the initial design. With this in mind, Kevin and I both decided to do a Headless Guitar.
Stratocasters are designed to be lightweight and effortless guitars to play. Tuning is at the top of the guitar where the head is located and pickups, located on the body of the guitar, pick the electromagnetic signals from the vibrating strings which make noise from an amplifier. We both decided to remove the tuners from the head of the guitar and place those tuners towards the bottom under the pickups. We decided to model after the DeLuze Orphean, a futuristic guitar that is seen in the videogame Cyberpunk 2077 by CD Projekt Red. This project aims to make one of the first known models of DeLuze Orphean while creating a unique look to the Stratocaster guitar.
Electric guitars are complicated in design so the explanation will be in-depth. The guitar's scale length, or the length of the vibrating section of an open string, will be 24.75 inches, which is the same as a regular Gibson guitar. The body will be composed of Korina wood, with a mahogany neck and an ebony fingerboard. These components will be developed in Adobe Illustrator and carved out with power equipment. HSS (humbucker, single coil, single coil) pickups will be used. The space in which they will be put will be carved out with a Router. The neck will be shaped similarly to that of the Ibanez Wizard Neck. The bridge will be a headless guitar bridge with fine tuners rather than headstock tuners. A laser cutter is required to cut the inlays for this bridge as well as the string clamps. The fret marks will be in the shape of missiles and will require the use of a laser cutter to carve out. The frets will be inserted in a precut fingerboard using a Fret Press Caul, then leveled, smoothed, and polished with a fret rocker, a fret leveling beam, a re-crowning file, and steel wool. After that, we will glue the body, neck, and fingerboard together. Multiple coats of spray paint may be applied to the instrument, and it may be aged with sandpaper. Black paint will be applied to the body, with chipping around the borders. With a silver strip above the truss rod, the neck will be painted red. In addition, the fingerboard will be stained black. Finally, the guitar's electronics and general components may be fitted. The pickups, knobs, switch, and the bridge will all be put onto the pickguard, which will then be fitted onto the instrument. A soldering iron can then be used to connect the electronics.
The money for this project is for each part: the body, the neck, the fingerboard, and the electronics. The tools will cost $390.11 if we don’t have the desired tools for the project. The Korina wood, which costs $91.76, is the sole component we'll need for this portion. The neck will set us back $75.81 in total. The fingerboard pieces will cost $85.53, but there will be a significant quantity of tools required, which will cost $206.29. Finally, the electronics section's components will cost $230.79. The project's total cost is $1,085.20.
We plan to finish the project by the end of 2021. The project should resemble the DeLuze Orphean while having the quality of a Fender or Gibson. Our mentors Jordan Hudson and Gabe Bravo, who work with Kevin at Memorial Music, will guide us through the design process of the guitar such as electrics and woodwork. This guitar will have a headless design and twenty-four frets. The guitar will also be quite comfortable to play and will sound similar to guitars priced around $1500. We are excited to continue working on this project throughout the summer and into the next school year. With your support, we will be able to design our ideal guitar.
Best regards,
John Ledet and Kevin Sullivan
Summary
For our Senior project, we will be building a custom guitar based on Johnny Silverhand’s DeLuze Orphean from the game Cyberpunk 2077. ASE has significantly improved our engineering skills which I use on a regular basis at the guitar store at which I work. I have done multiple repairs on guitars including a customization of Epiphone Les Paul, which I replaced the pickups, and electronics as well as lowered the action and sanded the frets. For this reason we decided that building a guitar from scratch was the next step for our engineering experience. Because we decided that building just a regular Les Paul model or Stratocaster model would be too easy, with a large amount of parts and components being readily available and preassembled, we decided to make a very unique guitar in the form of the DeLuze Orphean. Less than five of these guitars exist, and all of them have been custom built by talented guitar builders.
The main goal of this project is to create a very high end guitar that feels better than most guitars of the same price range. This is quite the challenge as the guitar will cost over a grand. This puts it in a similar range to brand new Gibson and Fender main line models. These guitars are nearly perfect with the only flaw being the relatively low fret number. What really separates this guitar from the models that it is based off of is the tuners. The guitar will follow the design of a headless guitar with no tuners on the head and fine tuners on the bridge instead. This change does not improve nor detract from the playability of the Orphean and instead the change is to stay consistent with the original guitar.
The project itself will be to create an electric guitar. This guitar will have the scale length of a Gibson at 24.75 inches. It will have 24 frets that fit this scale length and the fingerboard will be made of black stained ebony. The radius of the fretboard will be 12 inches. The fret markers will be in the shape of missiles placed in the standard positions of the third, fifth, seventh, nineth, twelfth, fifteenth, seventeenth, nineteenth, twenty-first and twenty-fourth frets. The markers on the twelfth and twenty-fourth frets will have two missiles. The body will be made of korina wood that will be painted black in a Stratocaster shape that has a cutout where the bridge will be placed. The neck will be made of mahogany wood that is painted red with a silver strip over the placement of the truss rod. It will be the shape of an Ibanez Wizard Neck. The pickups will be silver and black pickups and will be in a humbucker, single coil, single coil order from bridge pickup to neck pickup. The bridge will be a headless guitar design with fine tuners on the bridge. The body will have a black pickguard designed for installing the pickups and knobs.
Constructing this will take a large amount of specialized tools for shaping the guitar and piecing it together. To shape the body we will need Adobe Illustrator to draw a detailed model of the guitar. Then we will need clamps, a jigsaw, a router and a drill to shape the body as well as create tunnels for the electronics to pass through. Similar tools will be needed to shape the neck as well with the addition of a hand saw to shape the head of the guitar. The fingerboard will come pre slotted so what we must do is use a laser cutter to add the inlays for the fret markers and headstock. The frets themselves will also need to be installed and they require a large amount of specialized tools with a fret press caul to get them in place. Then a fret rocker, a fret leveling beam, a re-crowning file and steel wool will be needed to straighten and polish the frets. Finally to get the electronics installed we will need a drill and a soldering iron. To help us with this we will have friends that specialize in guitar repair and are willing to help us find the tools we need and use them properly to make the guitar as playable as possible. We will complete this project together with the help of the mentors listed above.
After the guitar is finished it will be used for both of our college applications by submitting videos of us playing it to universities that want videos of us showing off a hobby or talent that cannot be demonstrated in our resumes. By doing this we will advance our engineering careers in multiple facets and prove our passion for engineering to the schools in which we apply.
Introduction
As students of Stratford High School, we both strive for the best from ourselves. We both are extremely competitive and have interests in engineering. Kevin wants to become a social engineer while I (John) have interests in chemical engineering. To feed our competitive natures and expand our knowledge in engineering, we decided to apply to ASE. With the privilege of being accepted into the Academy, we have been able to unite our creativity and engineering skills in ways we have never experienced. Our teachers have given us full freedom on how we approach our projects and rarely set boundaries. This class is a project-based curriculum, and any project students complete is connected to science and engineering in some way. Forensics, clean energies, and architecture are among the projects we do. With our senior project being the current project at hand, no boundaries have been set and we can do whatever we desire. This project is for the students, not the teachers.
With our project being a headless electric guitar, we both want to finish most of the project during the summer. Both of our schedules are the most open during the summer and our fall schedules will be taken up by college admissions; however, we will still find time to finish this project before 2021 ends. We will both make weekly updates on our project through our blog page. The blog page will consist of images and short descriptions of how the project is going. We will work on the template of the guitar first with the body outlined. Next, the neck is very high maintenance and needs to have exact measurements; for that reason, it will be one of our priorities. Electronics and tuners will be placed in the body after working on the neck. With the guitar fully constructed, we will design and paint the guitar to match our model (DeLuze Orphean). A lot of our parts will be purchased during June since some will take weeks to deliver.
Guitars are a familiar area of work for both of us; however, the construction of a Headless Guitar will bring complications. Flipping tuners from one side of the guitar to another and creating an accurate model will be a difficult task, but we are willing to go the extra mile. Both of our competitive and studious backgrounds will aid the completion of our project, including the support of our mentors at Memorial Music. We hope while you read this you will consider supporting our efforts.
Statement of Need
With our passions of engineering and guitar, we will finish this project at ease. We will explore the basics of electrical engineering and the design of a Headless Guitar. Our project budget will cost just over a thousand dollars which is quite an investment; however, the support of our mentors and summer jobs should cover a majority of the costs. Our priority is to create an abstract and top-quality Headless Guitar that is modeled after DeLuze Orphean. Headless Guitars are underrepresented in the guitar community and we seek to create awareness over their potential success. If we are successful in modeling the DeLuze Orphean, our model will be one of very few in the world.
We aren’t licensed electricians and we don’t model guitars for a living. Doing this project will prove to other students that you don’t have to be anything to make something spectacular. The Guitar is a creative outlet to many and we want to share the impact that it had on us.
Objective
The goal of this project is to produce a high-quality and accurate model of the DeLuze Orphean Guitar from Cyberpunk 2077 by CD Projekt Red. The skills we will develop from this project include woodwork, electrical engineering, and guitar design. We both felt motivated to do this project due to our passion for guitar and the challenge that headless guitars bring.
Production of our guitar will begin in the early summer of 2021, and we will continue production by the fall of 2021. We plan that the project will be completed by the end of 2021, if not sooner. A third of the summer will be used to gather all of the resources needed to make the guitar. June will be the month where most of our supplies should arrive. The second third of the summer will be focused on the body, neck, and the overall template of the guitar. By July, most of the neck and lower body should be carved out. The final third of the summer and the beginning of fall will be focused on inputting electrical equipment, designing, and painting. Each part will be complete in August and some finishing details, like smoothing the neck, will be done. In October, the electronics and bridge should be installed with a full paint job added to the guitar. November is the deadline for our guitar to be finished. Judging on how much traffic our schedules will have, we should finish our project on schedule.
Timeline
June 2021- The wood for the body, neck and fingerboard will all have been purchased by the end of the month and the shape of the body will be carved
July 2021- The neck will be carved out and inlays will be carved into both the headstock (for the fictional brand and for the string clamps), the fingerboard (for the fret markers), and the lower body ( for placing the bridge).
August 2021- The frets will be laid in the fingerboard and properly smoothed. Following this the process of gluing the guitar together will begin.
September 2021- The guitar will be painted and weathered.
October 2021- The electronics, bridge, knobs, clamps, pickguard, and nut will be installed.
November 2021- The project will be completed and functional.
Methods
Electric guitars are very complicated to build so we have more than our hands full. The scale length of the guitar -the length of the vibrating portion of an open string- will be 24.75 inches long, falling inline with the standard Gibson guitar. The body will be made of korina wood while the neck is mahogany and the fingerboard is ebony wood. Each of these sections will be designed with Adobe Illustrator, and cut with power tools such as jigsaws and hand saws. The pickups will be a HSS (humbucker, single coil, single coil) position. A Router will be used to carve out the area in which they will be placed. The neck will be our take on the Ibanez Wizard Necks in shape but will be bolted on. Using sanders jigsaws and hand saws The bridge will be a headless guitar bridge that uses fine tuners instead of tuners on the headstock. The inlays for this bridge and the string clamps need to be cut with a laser cutter. The fret markers will be in the shape of missiles and need to be carved out with a laser cutter as well. The frets themselves will be placed in a precut fingerboard (the tools are not accessible as they are made with incredibly specific tools that cost thousands) using a Fret Press Caul then leveled, smoothed and polished with a fret rocker, a fret leveling beam, a re-crowning file, and steel wool. After this the body, the neck and the fingerboard can be glued together. The guitar can be painted using multiple layers of spray paint and weathered with sandpaper. The body will be painted black with chips around the edges. The neck will be painted red (close to the natural color of mahogany but without the wood texture) with a silver strip over the truss rod. The fingerboard will be stained black as well. Finally the electronics and general components of the guitar can be installed. This will begin with installing the pickups, the knobs, the switch, and the bridge into the pickguard which will then be installed onto the guitar. The electronics can then be hooked up using a soldering iron. After that the project is finished.
Evaluation
This project will be a success when the guitar can not only be played, but feel as comfortable as a Fender or Gibson guitar. On top of this the guitar must have some unique traits such as the headless bridge and the combination of the best aspects of Fender and Gibson guitars, namely: the neck length, scale length, fret length, and neck radius of a Gibson along with the body and pickups of a Fender.
This guitar will be a boon not only to the two of us but to the wider community as the guitar will be used to teach kids, at the music store which we work, how to play guitar as well as how to customize their own guitars to fit whatever needs they have for one. This guitar will also help the store, which is a family owned small business, gain more customers as the guitar is incredibly unique and is certain to catch the attention of guitar lovers who are passing by.
We picked this project because we have both made heavy modifications to guitars before so building one from scratch seemed like the next step to take. We both have skill in building things out of wood and have a passion for electrical engineering so this project is the best of both worlds. This project will mainly serve to teach us how to properly budget ourselves, schedule and plan for long scale projects as that is an area that neither of us are particularly strong in. However, learning that skill will be a necessity for completing this project. This project will be hard, costly, and take a lot of time. The key characteristic that we will need to adopt for this project is consistency. We must finish sections by the time detailed by the timeline or we will fall behind schedule. However with our skills and knowledge this project will be one that is within our grasp.
Budget
The budget for this project can be broken up into four main categories: the body, the neck, the fingerboard, and the electronics. Most of the cost of the body is made up of the tools which will cost $390.11 in the worst case scenario (meaning we don’t have the tools at the music store). The only part that we would need for this section is the korina wood which costs $91.76. The neck will have a total cost of 75.81. The parts for the fingerboard will have a total cost of $85.53 however there is a large amount of tools needed which will total to $206.29. Finally the components of the electronics section will total to $230.79. The total cost of the project is $1,085.20.
Conclusion
By the end of 2021 we plan to have constructed a guitar based on the DeLuze Orphean from Cyberpunk 2077 that will be fully playable and function while meeting the quality of a Gibson or Fender guitar. This guitar will be one of less than 10 DeLuze Orpheans that exist, all of which have been custom made. With the help of our mentors Jordan Hudson and Gabe Bravo, we will be successful in this project. They will guide us in what we must do to install a certain piece of the guitar as well as where we can go to get the parts we need to construct this guitar. This guitar will be a headless style guitar with twenty-four frets, making an ideal guitar for shredding. The guitar will be incredibly comfortable to play as well as will sound comparable to guitars in the $1500 price range. We look forward to working on this project over the summer and throughout the following school year. Thanks to your help we will be able to create the guitar of our dreams.
Appendix
Diagrams
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