...with the least effort.
Update: July 29, 2010
I envision a distributed production network where each person could build as little or as much of a guitar as they please, with minimal tools, and be compensated somehow through an online guitar/parts/bank, in either finished guitars, parts for guitars, money or other medium of exchange.
The guitar parts are modular and so it is possible to break down the construction of a guitar into steps that lend themselves to small-scale mass-production.
Someone with just a small hand saw, some glue and clamps or weights, could make the end and heel blocks.
They would need milled wood for guitars, that would be expensive. I guess my vision has more in common with tiny third world manual-labor economies teeming with tropical trees and little sawmills than a huge temperate-boreal northern industrial one. We'll see where we can go with that. Maybe I'm too idealistic.
I just realized my guitar design was conceived in the 1980's when it seemed like we'd play on the streets at the end of the world. Maybe idealistic is the wrong word....
My vision is a low-tech guitar, a green guitar, a solar guitar. The end happened long ago in the so-called third world. Now is the beginning again.
It's morning on Earth.