While wood is a beautiful material for building stringed instruments, its dimensional instability causes detuning and over time neck warpage and bending. In order to tackle this, Rudo Enserink set off a search for alternative materials for electric guitars as graduation thesis at the Delft University of Technology, faculty of Industrial Design Engineering in 1991. With three patents pending he started Enserink Innovation BV to manufacture these guitars in 1992.
The guitars feature a patented carbon fiber neck construction that is laminated in a gel coated mold prior to injecting a proprietary material blend called "Sound Compound". After curing of this compound, the guitar is ready to be finished and assembled.
Two other features on these designs are auto-locking string clamps inside the top nut and an asymmetric tremolo/tuning unit. The guitars could be headless but it was decided to put a head stock on for the shop racks.
In order to match the styling of the guitars to the most advanced yet acceptable criterion, as part of the thesis a marketing survey was staged using 12 different mock-ups as stimuli for a respondent group of 25 guitarists from a cross-section of genres. The results were indicative for the design appreciation offset from the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson Les Paul models, across the musical genres.
The guitars have a beautiful rich tone and are incredibly stable due to the lightweight carbon neck structure.
The guitars displayed on this page are from the 1995 production series.
In 1996 Enserink Innovation BV continued as Catalyst Instruments BV, which later sold the build technology to Aristides Instruments BV, who are injecting quality guitars to this day.