When employees at Clippard Instrument Laboratory set out to make a new exhibit for their 2012 trade show schedule, they wanted something cool and unique that would draw attention to their pneumatic and automation products. Their answer is a pneumatic guitar that plays more than two dozen songs with over 36 notes running on 50-psi air pressure.

Rob Clippard, the guitar’s primary designer and developer, recalls part of the challenge was making the guitar. “We had myself and a few other engineers working on it, sometimes pulling all nighters,” he says. Others working on the project include Chris Rhodes, Jerry Grotelueschen, Brett Vidal, Bill Clippard and Ed Ehrhardt.

The main design challenge was trying to mimic the motion of the human hand. “If you asked 100 engineers how to do this, you might get 100 different ideas on how to build a pneumatic system,” says Clippard.  He adds one of the hardest parts was the “fret,” or the control of what would be the left hand that holds down the strings along the guitar’s neck. “You have to come off the strings with a certain velocity to mute the string at the correct time while sliding your hand to position your fingers for the next set of notes,” he explains. “Engineering the movement, positioning, and force feedback systems for this application is hard to replicate in a more cost-effective solution as pneumatics.”

There were marketing challenges with the exhibit too. “With this exhibit we are getting people to think about new applications with pneumatics,” explains Clippard. “We are also trying to show that Clippard does more than sell pneumatic components. Our engineers use creativity to design, development, assembly, test, among other functions to simplify the tasks for other companies in terms of effort.”

The pneumatic guitar has 58 electronic valves and 62 miniature pneumatic cylinders from 5/32” diameters up to half-inch bore that help mimic the motion of the human hand “fretting” , “picking” and “strumming” the six guitar strings.

A Wi-Fi card and iPad with a midi player app control of the pneumatic guitar. All other guitar parts are standard, off-the-shelf units, except the manifolds.

Engineers at the company normally custom design their own manifolds in house with Solidworks CAD software. But with this job, they were able to use a vector-based drawing program for tracing the outline of the guitar to guide laser cutting of the manifold and valve subplates.

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