I started playing guitar on a cheap acoustic with high action and no cut away. Though I wasn't very good, the guitar didn't help. Certainly, upper fret access was non existent. Getting my first electric the high action problem was solved, and I remember being excited about finally being able to access the upper frets only to have my left hand run into the heel.
Now years later, I'm still not a very good guitarist, but reaching around the heel has always bothered me. Thinking there has to be a better way, Saguaro Guitars was born.
A body of a standard bolt on electric guitar is 1 3/4" thick. A 5/8" neck pocket leaves 1 1/8" for the heel thickness. Since thinning the body at the neck joint to reduce the heel thickness would result in weakening the neck joint, Saguaro's patent pending design mounts an aluminum block inside the body to strengthen the neck joint and by routing the body into a wedge shape, the heel of a Saguaro Guitar is only 0.3" thick.
The exploded CAD image below shows the construction of a Saguaro Guitar.
The photos below are of a Saguaro Tombstone Guitar showing the body routing and how the aluminum block fits inside the body.
The block is made of high strength 7075 aluminum alloy and ties the bridge to the neck joint. Constructing a guitar in this manner also allows the wiring routes between the pickup cavities and control cavities to be lined with copper tubing to improve the shielding. The bridge mounting screws are also 6-32 machine screws threaded into tapped holes in the aluminum block instead of wood screws into the body. The CAD images below compare a Saguaro Guitar (top) with a normal 1 3/4" thick bolt on electric guitar (bottom) to show the difference in the neck joints and the body shapes.
The images below show how thin the heel is on a Saguaro guitar.