jer7440

I play at my church, twice a month on Wed. nights. Once in a while on sunday. Most of the guy are working pros. Very stretching but also a little intimidating

The Eastons, well the plan is to refletch them and then go kill bambi. Well, next deer season anyway.

Yeah that machine is pretty big. The table travel are 40"x20"x20" x,y, and z. Easily long enough to do my neck, that's next. If you look at the pic of the mahogony body blank, on the left side of the table saw is the neck blank I laminated out of mdf. Just another prototype. Mdf is nice and cheap to practice on. I don't feel too bad if I screw it up

Hehehe...you should finish the MDF body up with a plywood neck, just to see how it sounds...good work so far!

It is hard to see how much relief you have on the carve (relief=height change from center to edge); is it similar to a regular LP?

On the real deal I would not do the knobs like that (tops parallel to the original top plane); make the knob tops parallel to the carve if you want it to be true to the original.

The neck pocket looks very deep...the whole body looks thick to me.

I plan to finish the mdf body, but I am going to use real wood for the neck, primarily for strength.

The top is 3/4 thick and the deepest part of the carve is 1/2 deep. I'm not sure how to photograph the thing to make that show up better.

Carve wise my design is more extreme than the the real LP, but I wasn't going for and exact copy. I kind of like the knob recesses.

The main body of the guitar is 1 1/2 and the top is 3/4" at the max giving me an overall of 2 1/4 which I think is standard.

holy freakin $#it. is this your garage or a shop you work at? I imagine a shop, but what a machine. Remember I want my LP top done so please let me know, I can even be your test subject if need be

That machine is in the shop of the family buisness. That thing is pretty sweet to use. As far as doing your lp top, the cad I created is not standard. It is my own variation on the theme. I hope to be doing my real wood soon, so i'll let you know how that comes out.

Well I finally got to borrow a digital camera so here where I am at:

lp1

And here are some more links

lp2

lp3

Here is the machine I cut it on:

CNC machine

My prototype was made up of pieces of MDF I glued together, but I went out yesterday and bought a sweet 1 piece mahogny blank for the body and enough mahogany to make 2 necks. Here is a pic of the body blank:

body blank

This blank came off a board that was about 1 9/16 thick 14 1/2" wide and about 10' long. I would have loved to buy the whole thing, but budget dictates.

I know the pic suck but I couldn't get the flash to work on the borrowed camera. I will figure it out tonight and get some better pics.

Why shouldn't Bigsby protect their mark? If you had invested the time and money into developing your own trem system, and your trem became an industry standard, how would you respond to joe blow selling, a cheap chinese knockoff for 1/3 the price using your name?

Bring it closer to home, take Kevan and his Tremol-no for instance. I'm sure he could tell some nightmare stories about the hoops you jump through to protect your product under the law. Why bother if you are going to let every Tom, Dick and Harry, sell their knockoff under your name?

I think your new design looks 10Xs better than the first. Nice job.

Gitcad,

No worries on response time. I',m always missing stuff on here, there is just so much traffic.

Someone else on here, ACspike I believe is his name on the forum, has a web site with probably 20 to 30 vector outlines of various guitars. He also created a program to convert those vector outlines to DXF. When I import these dxf files all the curves import as splines.

I played with a machining simulation using one of these outlines and I found that if I turn my tolerance setting low enough I can machine these splines with almost no faceting. The programs get quite large, but for simple 2d machining it would be no problem. The faceting that does result is very fine and would be easy to sand out.

Using these spines in a 3d application would still be a pain in the butt.

On another note, I did manage to machine my les paul body over the holidays and I am very happy with the results. The 2d work and the 3d carve all came out beautifully. all I have to do is some sanding to get ready to finish. I don't have a digital camera, and I havn't taken the time to borrow one, but when I do I will post the pics right away. I have a thread started in the in progress and finished section, I'll post the pics there.

It seems we have hijacked the crap out of this thread so maybe our future dicussion would be better placed in that thread. Here it is:

3d lp thread

I will also check out your new forum.

Could you elaborate a little more on what you are looking for? Do you want cad files w/dimensions or something else? What have you got to work from?

It looks to me like just the one side of the pocket is off, right? If so I would true up that side with a very sharp chisel. Get it nice and square with the left side and the bottom. Then you can glue in a piece of wood say 1/2" wide and as deep as the neck pocket. Shape the wood to fit the radius and the bottom of the pocket so it all looks nice and neat. Then put your neck in and line it up just the way you want it to be and clamp it down. Then create a "fence" per Maiden's instructions, and reroute the one side of the pocket.

This all assumes that the left side of the pocket is accurate. If not you may have to do both sides.

You could try a 10mm straight reamer like this:

10mm straight reamer

If you take a 3/8 drill (.375) and open up your existing holes (the drill should self center on the existing hole if you use a drill press) then run this reamer through after you should get a pretty accurate hole with no taper. Make sure to go slowly with the reamer and pull the reamer out of the hole frequently to allow the chips to escape.

link came up file not found.

Gf

If you get the scan, you PM me. Maybe post here as well, no one PMs me much so I don't remember to even look to see if I have messages. I'll definitely see it if you post here.

Hey GF

Do you have the tech drawings for that floyd in any kind of electronic format that you could post or email to me. I'd be willing to take a look at it. Maybe I could CAD it for you. Maybe machine it. Depends on what you need.

You have an amazing gift with the airbrush man. Thats just so original and well done.

I get WOOD magazine and they are constantly listing Lee Valley tools as a source for various tools. As was said before the carry very high quality stuff.

Just wondered how you like your HF bandsaw?

You could glue in a plug and then reroute the neck pocket. If you glued in a piece of the original body wood you probably would never notice.

I think it all depends on how you operate. If you are a person who has to have every detail in order and on paper before you can do anything, then this is time well spent. If you can operate by just knowing what style guitar you want and few details like scale length and bridge type, neck angle etc., by all means start making sawdust!

Cool thanks, that's just what I needed

Anyone know off hand what the depth of the neck pocket is on a LP? Setch, what did you use?

Well I said I hoped to cut a prototype by x-mas and here it is x-mas eve and The mill is carving the top as I type. No in progress pics though, I still don't have a digital camera . I will post some pics as soon as I get someone to loan me theirs.

The only thing I would suggest is maybe 1 more spacer on each row just to shorten the span in the middle.

I think this is a natural transition we all go thru. The higher quality lesser quantity thing, compacting the tone down to it's basic fundamental roots and shedding the extra fat.

Amen brother. Besides it get tiring carrying all of that extra stuff

Don"t pups work by sensing the movement of the steel string through the pups magnetic field? The pup doesnt actually "feel" vibration..right? This being the case does it really matter if the pup is floating or solid?

I am not trying to be a smarta$$, I just want to make sure I understand this correctly

Stickering is when you store your lumber in stacks, with spacers between each board. The spacers, obviously should be the same thickness, and spaced about every 18" or so. On the very top you might add some weight. This keeps pressure on the boards in the stack and as they dry they stay straight.

Some times if you get a board with a twist, if you sticker it you can make it go back straight.