DougK

Me too! I think Im going to be doing that "mistake" from now on out. Thanks Steve-O! Im sure we'll come up with something. Sure is hard to beat New Castle... 'specially after 5 hours of polishing cars (both the wife and I's were in dire need) On a side note, Im missing some of the hardware I need. I think between the 3 years and moving twice it maybe lost for ever. Im missing the nuts for the tuners (planet waves says they dont sell replacement nuts for them...lame) and the nut for the switch. Im not having much luck finding replacements for either. I think Im going to have to try mcmaster-carr or something unless some one knows of a place I keep missing.

I dig it, I like the 2 colors quite a bit

Cream Speed Knobs: http://www.guitarpartsresource.com/guitark..._speedknobs.htm This is a very interesting project and it looks like its coming along really well, aside from the CNC screw up on the walnut. I come from a woodworking background too. I have to say that you have very good woodworking skills and you should definitely try a set neck neck time and build everything, including the neck. If I can do it, so can you. Sweet! Thank you so much, thats exactly what I want!!! I actually really like the "mistake" on the back, I think it worked out for the best. Makes it kind of unique (atleast thats what I have to tell myself). Did get a bit more done today. Got the cavity mostly hogged out, setup for the switch and the volume/tone pot. Got the bridge done, fixed the mistake pilot holes and got the straplocks on. Till I get a few things on order next week, I think this be it for now. pic2 I am REALLY enjoying my time here... was up most of the night surfing around (plus this icon rules)

double doh! That would be me on my father in laws account Im actually up right now because this is driving me nuts. Half tempted to drive down to the shop right now and fix the problems with the neck pocket/bridge. ... turn off brain let me sleep!

I've read through this and thought I'd throw my 2cents in as someone who programs a cabinet shops CNC's for a living and building his first guitar on it. The CNC is awesome. But I honestly think for the people working up something for the first time, hand is WAY faster. Trace out what you want on a board for a body shape and cut it on the bandsaw. On the flip side, programming the CNC for the first time can be a long, long, long tedious task. If you had a tablet/digitizer this can be a bit quicker and a bit more intuitive but sometimes its tough to "feel" something drawn in 2d on a computer screen. Speaking of, our personal CNC an SCMI Tech 99l is 7 years old, might as well be 50. Its a 3axis machine with limited 3d abilities (basically you have to trick it into doing what you want). We bought our machine just before the 5 axis stuff hit the market (and in all fairness, for making cabinet parts we dont need it) and it cost a 110k lol. Now, should I have a 5 axis with good 3d software this would be a slightly different story. Either way though, the benefits of CNC are almost all after the fact. Setup and programming time is IMMENSE for a completely new design. I literally had hundreds of hours in programming mine, tweaking, ect. I can't even think about the time I have into mine. The upide that the CNC has over everything is mockups. I literally have probably 50 different pieces of scrap that resemble various parts of guitars littered about the shop over the years. The ability to throw a piece of scrap on the machine to see if everything is going to jive or not. I would never be able to bring myself to actually cut a guitar blank w/out one (I'd never be quite... ready to take the plunge). Everyone knows that CNC's are accurate. To me besides the mockup ability, the real benefits in CNC's are repeatability. All of my mock up guitars had exactly the same body shape. I could stack 15 of them and they were all identical. The accuracy is amazing... the only issues we run into is when the bits start to wear under their programmed size. From a production stand point, the CNC is a no brainer. Once you get the thing dialed in, you start feeding material in and walk away. Also, in my case now that I have one completely dialed in I can do things like change the shape of just the body w/out major reprogramming (ie keeping the neck, scale and bridge the same). I love mine... its completely ruined me. After so many years of having one if I had to cut a circle by hand I'd be almost lost by now lol. Just my 2cents (USD). It really blows me away the quality of work here by guys in their garages doing it completely by "hand". Makes me feel kind of lame actually. lol

Thanks Jason I farted around a bit today at the shop. Im mostly hung up waiting for hardware so I decided to mess around. I wrote a couple programs to knock out some knobs and pickup covers out of wood. Dug through the rack for something hard (so it wouldn't explode on the CNC) just to see what would happen. pic1 I *had* 2 knobs... the belt sander sent one across the shop ... doh pic2 pic3 pic3 Honestly, Im 50/50 on it. If I do make them out of wood, it'll probably be Maple but left clear so it'll contrast from the blue cap. I think I might make up a set just to have. If I dont like em I'll stick to the plan of just using cream pickup covers and black knobs (I wish they made cream speed knobs). Sadly, thats about all I get to do between now and next week. I might go ahead and put the bushings for the bridge in this weekend... but then again I might get lazy again lol.

Yep! Thats exactly the color and look Im going for. Man Im really enjoying surfing around here (so bored with cars now). I'll be spraying it in our spray booth, probably using a nitrocellulose lacquer. The side note of the CNC taking ALOT of time to program is now I can crank another one out in about 6 hours... my father in law is already pulling stuff out of our lumber racks (btw, stay safe in San Diego. My brother lives there and the fires came with in a couple ridges of his house before the winds shifted finally)

Blue and shinny lol. Probably isn't going to be super original but for my first attempt, I just want to see how everything works out then maybe go a bit more creative next time. Actually, thats the reason I found my way over here was to start reading up on the finishing techniques (we dont do finishing in house any more). LOL it weighs so damn much (and is so freaking loud) that it didn't get gigged for more than a year or two. Now it just moves from one side of the room to the other any more. No worries about the rules... every board has different ones. I moderate a couple turbo volvo forums so it happens. Not a bad piece of maple for 10 bucks eh :-D

pic1 pic2 pic3 So thats basically how it sits now. I have some hardware coming that I need for when I spend my day on the drill press doing the bridge, tone/volume pots and the jack. I still need to finish making the rear cover plate, planning on maple for that too. I wrote CNC programs to make the knobs and pickup covers out of wood but Im not sure if Im going to go that route (I do have some zebra wood and some brazilian rosewood laying around). So now basically a bit of time on the drill press than its sand-o-rama time Oh, some other projects I've done. I built this cab to take a 67 fender bassman piggyback into a combo pic4 pic5 pic6 The case is Cherry, soundboard is mahogany and maple Built this Allen amp (from scratch, did their DIY kit, freaking blast) pic7 pic8 pic9 Btw that is the best amp ever made. I never even touch my bassman anymore... those allens f'ing rule! Well, thats my project(s)! I'm hoping to be able to play the guitar by xmas.... or new years of any year I guess lol. Doug [Edited to change pics to links]

So that was october 2005... the last time I touched the guitar till this week. For one reason or another I just kind of forgot about it (car projects, bought my first house, remodeled my first house' kitchen ect, lived out of state for a while ect lol). I finally decided I was ready to start sculpting the top. So back to the trusty CNC I bought up my 1/2" OD fluting bit and started programing that. Once again our CNC software is pretty limited so I wasn't able to "see" any 3d shaping I might have been doing. Basically I freehanded arcs on the program and started offsetting them on 1/10th of an inch increments dropping various amounts as needed. After a day of mockups I had the program basically dialed in. Now like an idiot, I didn't have my camera with me so we basically skip straight to the results. After a few hours of sanding I had the guitar basically sculpted. pic1 pic2 pic3 Now... when I programmed the back it wasn't routing quite deep enough. Instead of fixing it at the computer end, I just told the CNC that the piece was 2mm thinner each time till I was happy w/ the neck relief. The problem was, I forgot it was cutting the taper on the top of the back. So w/out thinking I finally got the neck relief deep enough, but it routed right into one of the body chambers (3 to be exact)... DOH. Instead of fixing it walnut though, I decided to make my mistake an opportunity and make light of the situation. Ended up making maple plugs to fix them. [Edited to change pics to links...that last one was so cool I let it slide though ]

My neck showed up. Warmoth bolt on, 25.5" scale, american walnut with rosewood fret board. I think I finally decided I was ready to take the plunge by this point. So I put the walnut on the cnc and crossed my fingers. pic1 Came out rather well, exactly like it should have. Next I glued up the cap, stuck it in the vac press over night and pulled it out the next morning. pic2 At the end of the day I had this (the neck is just sitting in there, its really not mounted crooked I swear!) pic3 pic4 pic5 pic6 [Edited to change pics to links]

Mock up #2 using a squire neck I had laying around. So I should mention, that this has been a major on again off again project for me. I started the mockups in june 2004. The next time I touched it was Sept 05 when I glued up my body blank. pic1 pic2 1.25" thick black walnut pic3 Planed, sanded and ready to go (and enough to build another guitar... though I'll be damned if I can find that extra blank right now) pic4 pic5 [Edited to change pics to links]

Hello all! I dont know why I never bothered to find a guitar building forum, glad I finally found this place! Little back ground. Name's Doug obviously, been playing guitar for about 10 years now, off and on with local bands but pretty much just a hobby any more (house payments and cars eat up most of my time lately lol). Anyways, Im a second generation custom cabinet maker working in the family business (in sig). Been doing that 15 years too lol. Well long story short, once or twice a year one of our local lumber suppliers takes all the solid lumber that falls out of their racks, bundles ect and sells it to us for dirt cheap. 3 years ago, this piece showed up: (obviously I had already planed and glued it back together by the time I took this picture). So I stashed it and mentioned something to my (future) wife about one of these days I need to build a guitar. Well when my birthday came around, I got a box full of P90's and a fair amount of hardware (helps my father in law has been playing semi-professionally for decades so he knew what I wanted) so I guess I was building a guitar! So I worked up a game plan, decided I wanted to do a walnut, chambered body. I decided to pick my battles so I ordered a Warmoth bolt on neck figuring if I wasn't happy in the long run, I can take the "hard" part off and try again. specs: Walnut neck and body maple cap seymour duncan p90's goto 510 bridge planet waves self trimming tuners Now I should mention, I feel a bit of a looser after surfing around here all day. I cheated, I've done almost everything on our SCMI Sigma99 CNC router. I do the majority of our programming so this was almost natural for me. Now in all fairness, our SCMI is both Italian and fairly old (late 90's) so the italian version of CAD that is specific for our machine is a bit of a handicap... so Ill call it a draw : So I started off in the programming stages (back in late 2004 lol). I started by taking a black and white picture of a PRS, printing it to a transparency and sticking it to my monitor to "trace" in our cnc's software. This got the basic generic shape down then started doing some mockups on the CNC. pic2 pic3 So that was mock up 1 There was things I liked and disliked, notably the thickness', knob and switch positions and I decided to chamber the body horizontally. pic4 pic5 pic6 [Edited to change pics to links]