Steinberger: A Story Of Creativity And Design Book by Jim Reilly
Back in the very early 1980s I was a student at London’s South Bank Polytechnic studying for a degree in what would now be called Industrial Design. As part of my materials science module, I and my fellow students were given a presentation by a company that was developing applications for a new and immensely strong composite material: carbon fibre. Listening to the presentation with my bass player hat on, it occurred to me that carbon fibre could potentially be used to make a guitar neck, so I decided there and then that my final project on the degree course would be a bass with carbon fibre neck. Once I got into the project, though, I hit a snag, in that it was clearly going to be awkward to integrate a headstock at the end of the neck in moulded carbon fibre. While brainstorming the problem, one of my design lecturers asked why the tuning machines had to be at the neck end of the bass. Why cou