Engineering in Our Blood
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Engineering in Our Blood: From Grease Guns to Musical Freedom
My grandfather, Václav, was a farmer and an innkeeper in the small village of Křivice. I don’t know if he was the first in our lineage to be drawn to the world of engineering, but he was certainly the one who sacrificed everything for it. He sold his fields and his pub to build a workshop for his patented grease guns, which he eventually sold worldwide.
While his workshop was seized during the nationalization of the 1950s, the engineering spark could not be extinguished. After 1989, the building returned to our family and my uncle Kamil restored production. While the professional paths of my father and my brother Dušan led elsewhere, they both became masters of their crafts, where precision was always the highest priority.
The Accidental Chemist and a Bicycle Spoke
While Dušan followed the family tradition as a machinist, I became a chemist. But life has a way of pulling you back to your roots. In 1992, I started experimenting with guitar supports—cutting Plexiglas in my father’s workshop and heating it in my kitchen oven to hand-bend it over wooden forms.
The true turning point came in 1994. My ex-wife, a violinist, asked if I could repair her shoulder rest because it kept falling off. I realized it wasn't just a broken part; it was a systemic design flaw in nearly every rest available at the time.
"I took a simple pair of pliers and a spoke from a bicycle wheel and began experimenting. Right there at the kitchen table, I bent the wire until it held firmly on the violin. In that moment of improvisation, EFEL was born."
An Unintentional Tribute to a Legend
Interestingly, without knowing anything about Yehudi Menuhin’s system at the time, my experiments led me to a very similar principle—the roller mounting system. However, my design was simpler, more intuitive, and significantly lighter.
My true invention began where the old systems ended. While traditional rests offered only fixed heights and rigid surfaces, I utilized a soft but stable wire that allowed for individual height adjustment. To this, I added a malleable support surface that adapts to the player's unique anatomy. EFEL began adapting to the musician, not the other way around.
A True Family Effort: When I showed the prototype to my father, his eyes lit up. A few days later, he returned with a professional bending jig he’d made himself. Despite having a paralyzed left hand from an accident, his engineering mind found a way to build precision tools. For years, he was our master bender. Later, Dušan joined and created advanced fixtures that doubled our production capacity.
From Automotive CAD to the 2026 Series
In 2006, I took a detour into the automotive industry. I mastered CAD systems and spent years in development, working with 3D printing and laser shaping. This world of strict technical standards gave me the professional arsenal I needed for the modern era of EFEL.
Today, the fourth generation has joined the story. My son Gabriel, a professional violinist and teacher, is my primary consultant. Every new solution is tested together, blending a century of family ingenuity with 21st-century technology to give musicians the resonance and freedom they deserve.
Thank you for being part of our family journey.
— Luboš Forman