Vectric Customer

Hello, the boy has been into guitars lately & he asked me, "Why don't we make one on your fancy machine"? It's turning out nice so far...

Well now you know what to tell him........... Nice work especially for a first of. Be sure and post the final pics.

She’s complete! No paint, we liked the natural look. It turned out nice. Now I want to build more

Nice Job thanks for the finished photos.

Love the natural finish. Both my sons play guitar and my oldest has 4 strats, one of which I bought him 35 years ago. Wish I had your talent to make him a strat like that.
Beautiful job, thanks for posting.

Dave

a coworker playing it...

Crosetti wrote:a coworker playing it...

Nice that's like icing on the cake.

Awesome work on the body it turned out great. Did you also make the neck?

The way we built it was the easy way. For this first attempt I bought a neck, a loaded pick guard & all the bits. So it was like a kit without a body. I made the body then we put it together. It was a totally fun project for me & the boy. Now he has a guitar that he helped make & that's the best part.

For the next one I'm going to attempt to CNC the neck. Either just CNC the neck profile & hand shape the curvature, or find a good 3D model then I can CNC it all, we'll see...

Very nice work on your guitar. There is a lot of information on the CNC Zone website about building these with CNC machine techniques. Specifically in the Musical Instrument and Design section. You can probably find links todownloadable CAD files for some of the more popular guitars.

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/musical-i ... a2aa761df5

CarveOne

WOW! Thanks CarveOne!!!!!!!!!!

You're very welcome.

If you plan to create a new neck from scratch, you can find online fret position calculators on the following two sites. I usually use the one at the Stewart McDonald website, but they are both very useful.

http://www.stewmac.com/FretCalculator

http://www.liutaiomottola.com/formulae/fret.htm

You can have your CNC machine cut the fret slots with a small end mill, or mark them with a 60 degree sharp point V-bit for hand sawing them to depth. Accuracy of the spacing is as good as your machine's accuracy.

CarveOne

CarveOne wrote:
You can have your CNC machine cut the fret slots with a small end mill, or mark them with a 60 degree sharp point V-bit for hand sawing them to depth. Accuracy of the spacing is as good as your machine's accuracy.

CarveOne

Good to know, I'll make the fret board on the Camaster @ work. Its much more accurate than my little CNC Shark.

Your fret board will need a 3d model of the proper radius of the fret board. Then when you place vector lines for the fret cuts, draw a vector at the zero fret location. Then use the Offset tool to place a copy of the zero fret vector at each of the calculated fret locations. The fret vectors need to have the Project Onto Model option enabled when you set up the tool path for this operation. With an 0.023" diameter carbide end mill fret slots should be started just off to one side of the fret board outline so that it starts cutting on the side of the cutter and exits the fret board just off of the other side. CNC is much easier than hand sawing the slots if you have all of the operations planned out properly.

All of my cigar box/salad bowl guitar necks have flat fret boards. Much easier to make by hand or CNC machine. Usually three string, but a couple of four stringers may appear in the future.


CarveOne

Fantastic Strat Build!

Can you tell us where you got your strat body cut file. I don't mind paying for one as apposed to a hundred hours of my time to learn to make one poorly.

You can find tons of Strat copy guitars around for a hundred bucks but nothing beats saying you built it yourself!

Rick