Whenever there is a fork in the road, choose the path that creates the most freedom – Sophie Scott Brown

Optimise for choice

Optimise for flexibility, longevity, adaptability, repairability, community

Where possible, use easy to replace parts from the industrial supply-chain. Provide schematics for custom parts

Provide spares; sell all individual components separately

Eradicate all forms of rent-seeking: especially Intellectual property.

Everyone is free to do whatever they like with these designs – except turn them into more intellectual-property : Creative Commons Sharealike Licence

Beauty and humour are base-reality requirements

Not everything needs to have a purpose

Synergy and Serendipity are the twin sisters of Luck. Be kind.

Optimise for tinkering because playing with a thing is how we learn to work with a thing

Love is the Enabling of Choice

The best innovation happens when people solve problems they are actually facing themselves – Eric von Hippel Complexity is best navigated with safe-to fail, parallel experiments in adjacent-possibility – without goals, but with a sense of direction – David Snowden

Several years ago I started making guitars… badly, and of my own improbable design. Gotta start somewhere.

For the last 18 years or so my day job has been making mathematical instruments Golden Mean Calipers… … so it was only a matter of time before Synergy met Serendipity and I wound up making tools specifically for luthiers. >

I’d been tinkering with multi-point dividers for a while… …never really feeling like I’d got it quite right – due to the tyranny of 2-dimensionality which laser-cutting imposes… but then someone turned up and asked me about string-spacers, and I finally figured out how to do it : The brass fasteners I already had, with a hole going at right-angles to the thread. Who knew?

Turns out Spacers are useful for a whole lot more besides spacing strings… every day… if they didn’t exist I’d have to invent them.

They really shine as bisecting calipers for tricky surfaces… but I also use them to manage gold-leaf for gilding… finding distances on maps… and if you put 2 wheels on them they turn into Pixar Space Invaders. What’s not to love?

I’ve been road-testing them for about a year now – adapting as I go… a bit of an obsession – The whole time it was a case of “yea, nearly…, yea, nearly… yea, nearly”…

The final piece of the puzzle?

Stainless-steel set-screws with nylon tips. They don’t really change the functionality and they cost a whole lot more – but once they’re in place it became immediately clear that “ok – this is the one. We’re good to go”.