Australian musician builds 3D printed concertinas and violins from home workshop
Eddy Jay has spent six years refining polymer and carbon fiber instruments that are now sold to customers worldwide
Australian accordionist Eddy Jay, who has performed on Broadway and toured the UK, lacked woodworking skills and so turned to a 3D printer as an alternative path into lutherie. He redesigned the concertina’s internal mechanics entirely from scratch.
“I wasn’t very good at woodwork, so I bought a 3D printer and re-engineered it on a computer,” Jay said. “All the linkages are different inside, it’s completely new, and no one thought it would work, including my dad.”
After ten rejected prototypes, Jay sold his first instrument — and his father eventually requested one of his own. Jay has since produced dozens of concertinas shipped to buyers around the world, with each unit requiring approximately one month to complete.
Material behavior and acoustic trade-offs
The shift from wood to polymer demanded extensive experimentation. Jay found that plastic resonates differently from timber, altering both the mechanical behavior of internal components and the acoustic properties of the finished instrument.
“The way the levers work, the way the springs work, the way the buttons work, it’s all new,” he said. “The plastic behaves very differently from wood and it resonates differently as well. I found carbon fiber sounds best, it sounds loudest, sharpest, and unfortunately, carbon fiber is grey, so it doesn’t quite look as nice as my early concertinas, which were pink and green and rainbow coloured.”
Jay also fabricated a five-string violin for his wife and fellow musician, Josephine, who described its tone as unlike anything she had heard from a wooden instrument.
Jay now runs workshops and is developing a CNC-routed wooden instrument line using his existing computer designs. “I hope to be making wooden violins using that, but using my computer design, and I’m hoping to be making wooden concertinas,” he said.
“So there is an irony here; there’s a full circle where I’m back to using wood to make beautiful instruments, even though it’s using the cutting-edge technology that I feel more comfortable with.”
