17 Feb 2020
tags:  design  construction  improvements  

Changes and Revisions

Since the initial release of the Sycorax I have made quite a few changes. Some are tiny and not worth mentioning here and some are more significant.

Changes in "late 2019" model:

The "late 2019" instruments are the earliest ones I still have for sale and they are being sold at a discount. They are not all identical since I was trying out a few slightly different designs, but they are all similar and all the things I tried worked much the same. The changes for these included:

  • Inner brace moved to give more clearance from top.
  • Extra carbon fiber bracing in body and neck to stiffen the neck joint.
  • Still built with a bolt on neck, but they have all now been glued as well to be sure (to be sure).
  • Three different widths of pegbox were tried. All work fine but these models do vary in pegbox width.
  • Changed the output jack design to use a RCA connector on the pickup side.

Further changes in Feb 2020 model:

  • Settled on the medium pegbox width as standard (slightly narrower than the original).
  • Neck joint re-designed from scratch to be glued on with a carbon rod from the body extending into the neck - so super stiff and strong.
  • Fingerboard support added that ties in the fingerboard to the body, further stiffening the neck joint and upper body frame.
  • New top and back design with greater arching and more holes for more predictable response and greater feedback resistance.
  • Top and back woods now usually european spruce for the top and maple for the back, though other woods may sometimes be used.
  • Moved to using phenolic for nuts instead of ebony (I am trying to eliminate all use of restricted species). Some chinrests are still ebony, but these are easily replaceable. I haven't yet found a suitable affordable, high quality, black chinrest that isn't ebony. I do have boxwood chinrests though they don't match visually so well.
  • Reinforced the neck to pegbox joint with an additional carbon fibre rod (this was also done in a slightly different way as a retrofit to most of the 2019 instruments).

Gallery of Feb 2020 Version