rod. However, this isn’t a necessary feature of a guitar since the first truss rods didn’t appear until the early 20" century and guitar-like instruments with long, fretted necks have existed since the 12" century [4]. The fret slots on the fingerboard and the mounting holes on the back of the neck were also removed because they are unnecessary intricacies with regards to the normal stress in the neck. Figure 8: Simplifed Fender Stratocaster neck ‘The machine heads were also simplified, because Ansys could not successfully import them. Assuming this was due to the complexities in the functional machine head assembly, a completely new file was created. The new model took the basic shape of the machine head and was made to the same dimensions. The simplified model is shown below in Figure 9. Figure 9: Simplified machine head model -12-