Altra, a cardboard guitar stand

Altra.

A Cardboard Guitar stand.

Cardboard. Yes!

In a single year we produce more than 400 million metric tons of cardboard.

Thats a little over 1 million metric tons of cardboard each day.

Did you know that?

Every product you ever bought in your life, at some point in the past, had a cardboard sibling didn't it?

So where do all those cardboard boxes go? Well many of them get recycled into new boxes, many get buried under heaps of garbage.

I bet you have a little cardboard box lying in your garbage right now. What did you order? Amazon? Ikea?

Wouldn't it be nice if we could repurpose this amazing material to serve us a bit longer?

This little project is a step towards that.

Structure

The design of Altra follows a gravity force distribution structure. The triangular edges take the weight of the guitar and transfer it to the ground along the sharp edges aligned with the grain of the cardboard. This ensures that the cardboard doesn't undergo any deformation due to the weight of the guitar.

When the guitar is kept on the stand, due to the incline a torque will be generated which is managed by the front protrusion covered with a lid to also act a secondary storage unit for guitar strings etc.

Why the sound hole?

You might look at the design of this little monster and think to yourself, why is there a sound hole? Is this an instrument? Is this gonna make some sound?

[See how i tricked your mind already by saying 'sound' hole, instead of just a hole? LOL]

Well, no. One of the functions of visual aesthetics is to bring to perceptual relevance the purpose of a design. The hole's there to tell you that it belongs to the guitar and this is the side you approach from in order to place it on. When you see the form of this stand can't you tell, its go something to do with a guitar. Same family, brothers maybe? So you think.

If you happen to be a structural engineer reading this then you probably already know that the hole is also there to provide a breakage in the plane continuity in order to avoid warping of the flat surface. But that's secondary in this case, since the structure is proportionally quite small.

Green. Eco-friendly. Re-usable. Sustainable. All the Nice Words.

And did I mention,

DIY.