Stu.

That finish is super cool! It kind of reminds me of the intro sequence to His Dark Materials, showing the universes stacked together like threads.

Well, the new process seems to work! It certainly makes a change from fiddling to set up guides and panicking. I think that I’m now in the wrong thread, but I’m closing the loop from my previous couple of posts.

Not necessarily related to this build, but I recently bought the Elevate Truss Rod Slotting Jig Plus. I wanted something to take the stress out of routing for the truss rod and gluing the fingerboard on. It’s a pretty cool kit which covers routing the truss rod channel, drilling alignment pins, and drilling dots - all based on a self-centering jig. The only issue is that it’s designed for acoustic truss rods, so I’ve been prototyping some alignment pins for repositioning further up the neck. I’ve also taken inspiration from @Lumberjack’s thread and tried to make a router template to use the same bit and bushing as the rod jig. Also heavily inspired by @ADFinlayson’s jig with an alignment strip.

All better now!

It always seems to happen, right? As much as I didn't want to have cocked up the drawing, I also really didn't want my CNC to be out of calibration or giving me gremlins. Especially since I spent a couple of hours yesterday just calibrating the X steppers across the length of a fingerboard. They had a tiny error at 100mm, which compounded and put around 2mm onto the scale length. So yeah, happy to have been wrong with my drawing here!

You guys are far too kind. Hopefully it all fits together in the end! The string through holes in the body wandered slightly, so I made a small string block to hold the ferrules and basically cover up my mistake. After about two hours of work, I popped the ferrules in and noticed there was an error in my drawing I’ve fixed the spacing of the final hole now and no prizes for guessing my task for tomorrow… The wenge should match the heel block. Oh, and I’ll also be making a router template for the pocket!

I kept forgetting to post updates! This is the first board that I processed with my DIY CNC. Pockets for gold accents cut first, filled with thin CA and gold mica, and then sanded back. MOP inlays next, but the pieces needed loads of clean up with needle files. The fit in the pockets was pretty good - the machine lost portion around 12, so it has a dodgy margin. Cutting the phoenix inlay by hand for another guitar was much more satisfying, but I think it would end up prohibitively expensive for selling.

A bit of progress on the neck carve today too:

There's definitely some roughness keeping the line from being sharp. I'm finding that the veneer just looks too wide if I include it in the shallow part of the curve, but if I try to keep it thin it's actually quite brittle and splinters. I'm either going to have to sand it to hell and back to avoid chipping, or run a router cutter around to give a clean edge. It's a shame to lose connection to a project, so I'm hoping it returns later!

After what seems like forever, I have an update on this one! I wasn’t happy with the padauk fingerboard, so I started from scratch with ebony. I used white mother of pearl and gold mica instead. On a side note, I’m been following the Gibson method to construct this neck and I just don’t like it. I’ll go back to my usual order for the other projects. Here’s the new fingerboard, all fretted and glued to the neck:

Glad to see you're still alive! The build is looking great so far!

Thanks, Scott! My favourite thing about it is that it works!

This was my first thought too. It just looks air bubbles, which you can avoid by: Don't pour immediately. Let the mix sit for a while to give air bubbles chance to rise and pop Use a heat gun to blast the surface (keep it moving). This will pop air bubbles near the surface and also lower the viscosity so that deeper air bubbles rise quicker/easier to pop. If you're really fancy and have the spare cash, some people will use vacuum chambers to draw air bubbles out and then re-pressurise to force epoxy into the work. The epoxy will also scratch and gum-up quite easily if it isn't totally set and rock solid - particularly difficult if you're in a cold climate.

This response made my evening yesterday. Cheesy little puns and jokes are the best!

This CNC is working well so far! I’ve managed to get my fingerboard mounting jig sorted, started cutting some MOP, and finished by adding some personality.

I've just flicked back and spotted the scales on the truss rod cover. Such a neat detail and nod to the design language of the bass!

My dad used to ride XRs back in the 80's and has always been pretty obsessed with them! There's something about those rugged beasts

We have a spindle/router and test runs are good! I don’t have any means to measure the runout, but it looks very stable and cuts like a knife through butter. The other motors had at least 0.5mm of runout. The working area is enough for a normal guitar body (non-spiky) and 25.5” scale fingerboards.

Ha! That's always the way. The linear rails are just held in with 3x20mm wood screws - I'm hoping that with screws every 25mm, there will never be enough weight on a particular area to pull them out. I guess we'll seen how that goes! The bearing blocks are just held in with 10ga screws. I didn't go too crazy, because they're supported well in Z and Y, and then both sides of X are supported by the gantry and linear rails. It all seems to be holding for now, but threaded inserts might be needed in the future.

Thank you! Check out the BooTec video series for some inspiration: It's a really straightforward design and definitely DIY/hobbyist ability level. The real cost here is from the linear motion parts - the linear rails and ballscrews are quite expensive, but they're very solid. The ballscrews are very smooth and have absolutely no backlash, which is a huge upgrade compared to the T8 leadscrews I was using before. I did some research on stepper drivers and went with a slightly more expensive unit (DM556) for each motor, because I'd read about the cheaper drivers missing steps, overheating, and whining. I also didn't both with limit switches. I tend to just zero near my workpiece and then execute within a small area. Kind words, thank you! Hopefully I can run the first operations after mounting the spindle tomorrow. I calibrated yesterday, so should be good to go and fingers crossed!

Thanks, man. I do have a piece of ply to place over the top before adding a spoilboard, but you’re right and I will be monitoring the dust. Cooling might be an issue too. The 775 motors and ER11 collets in my inventory have awful runout, so I’ve ordered the equivalent of a Makita RT0700C with an ER11 on the armature. Speeds up to 30k RPM, no need for a power supply, and an accurate ER11 system with warranty.

I never know how to start threads cleanly, so here goes with spiel. I have a couple of guitars that are ready for fingerboards, which I would usually break out my tiny CNC for. It’s been playing up recently and I basically don’t trust it anymore, therefore it seemed like a good time for an upgrade! Being a hobbyist, I can’t afford to spend thousands on anything off the shelf - instead, I purchased some plans from BooTec for about £6 and got to work. The frame is 18mm ply, with Nema 23 steppers and SFU1605 ballscrews for linear motion. DM556 drivers and Arduino UNO with CNCShield inside. I painted it blue because Wickes plywood is ugly. Anyway, I finished the wiring yesterday and worked out the final gremlin this morning.

And we have a neck! I’ll sand the top face nice and level tomorrow. Still plenty of meat on it for the neck taper. Also, fingerboard prep!

Yeah, I decided to cut and re-glue this one. The birdseye figure is a real menace for tearing or chipping out when it’s being planed. I lost a bit too much material, so this neck now has a little fillet of ovangkol in the scarf. I’ll make a jig for the drum sander to run the headstock through and flatten the gluing face nicely - I just can’t get it with hand planes because of the figure. I also prepared and glued a bubinga faceplate for this one. The plan is to get both necks to the same stage and then batch them a bit. n=2 might save some time in set-up.

I like to hijack my own threads and I’ve been preparing another neck blank in the background. I glued it up, cut/planed the scarf, and then glued again. After taking the clamps off today, it was painfully obvious that the scarf crept during clamping. I’ve added the ears, however I’m on the fence about whether to re-cut and fix the alignment. What do you guys think?