note: V6 released at: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3575109

The Open Source Gurdy Project

A few years ago I took up the idea of building my own Hurdy Gurdy. Now I’m not much of a craftsman, so that might be a disadvantage. I am, however, a highly experienced mechanical engineer. My normal field is designing equipment for the high-tech industry, with customers around Europe, Japan and Silicon Valley in the US.

So I thought: why not use the tools of the trade, and create a Hurdy Gurdy using modern rapid prototyping technology: Laser Cutting and 3D printing? Would it be possible to create an instrument that is inexpensive to build, and still sounds well.

After about 4 years of working on it on and off, and 4 iterations, I am happy to say that the result is there. I’ve named it the Nerdy Gurdy, and I’m ready to release it into the wild.

http://www.nerdygurdy.nl

If you have questions or remarks: let me know. Based on your feedback I can further improve the design and manual.

FAQ

• The size of the drawings is 720 x 420 mm (3mm parts) and 610 x 420 (6 parts), but you can reposition the parts with programs like InkScape.

Change notes:
2017-12-26 Released first revision on Thingiverse (v5.0)
2018-03-26 Released v5.1
Changes:

• changed to 3 mm wood
• added a part to constrain the shaft at the front bearing to remove rattling
• added a jig to glue the backplate
• improved assembly manual
• tangent position more accurate
• various small modifications to make it more accurate and robust

2019-04-28 Released V6 (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3575109)