curtisa

Pictures will help in trying to diagnose your troubles. Prostheta's method posted on August 6 is the way to do it, but only as long as you have the two pieces 90% the way there before starting the sanding/flattening process. It may take a while to get the edges of two pieces flat enough, but it should be manageable - say 20-40 minutes of careful work. If you have to sand too much off to get the two pieces to meet perfectly it will take a long time to complete the process, and you'll run the risk of overworking the sanding and ending up with pieces that don't match up properly. Don't put too much pressure on the pieces as you sand them, otherwise you may end up with uneven faces. Moderate and even pressure should be sufficient Ideally your sanding/shooting board will be longer than the pieces you're trying to flatten. Any sand paper you apply to the shooting board should be secured so that it doesn't have any ripples or raised edges that could cause uneven sanding. If the board you are using to sand with is warped, or on a surface that can flex under the pressure of the sanding process, you will struggle to get a flat surface on your timber pieces. Marking the faces you are sanding with pencil lines and watching as the pencil gradually sand away can help in checking your progress as you go, and identify where you're either applying too much pressure or where you need to continue sanding. When the pencil lines have all sanded away equally you'll know that you've got the edges flat.

Seems to be. Had a bit of a struggle trying to get the axes to move smoothly until I adjusted some of the power management settings in BIOS. Getting used to Linux hasn't been too difficult so far. By and large it behaves pretty much as Windows does. Using LinuxCNC (formerly EMC2) to drive the mill. The machine came shipped with the demo of Mach3 but I couldn't get it to pick up my parallel port. LinuxCNC seemed to work straight away once the stepper config was set up (notwithstanding performance tweaking of the PC) so I've made the move to Ubuntu for the CAD/CAM/CNC side of things.

Doesn't look like much yet: But that'll work: Time to start making something real. A control cavity cover seems like a good start: Success! Just need to trim off the four little tabs on the edges that held the piece in place while cutting. Kinda reminds me of breaking the pieces off the packaging frame thingies in an Airfix kit: Oh, and this happened:

Haven't heard of grain raise on an oil-finished instrument, but I'm not a particularly sweaty person, and my gigging days are long gone now. Could also be down to a number of factors too - number of coats applied, pore density of timber, hardness of timber, the way it was applied... IME not all danish oils are created equally. Even the same product by a single manufacturer changes when they decide to tweak the formula. I used to use Cabots danish oil until the recipe changed and suddenly it wouldn't go on using my usual method without turning into a gummy, lumpy mess. I've settled on Rustins danish oil for now. Most people seem to use a wet flood coat on the first application, leaving it to settle for 10-15mins, rub out the excess, followed by subsequent lighter rub in/rub out coats with a light sand in between each coat. I've found that after the initial flood coat you need to rub out the surface every few minutes as excess oil tends to ooze up out of the pores for a while, particularly in open pored timbers. If they're left to dry on the surface you end up with little tiny flecks of solidified oil that will have to be sanded out. Wet sanding the oil with 600+ grit is another method that helps push the oil and slurry mix into the timber pores for a smoother finish. Surface protection is minimal (heat, water, abrasion, dents), but minor blemishes are easy to fix without having to strip the whole thing down and refinish. Despite this I much prefer the look and feel of oiled timber over uber-glossy finishes. The minimal tool and workshop requirements, and a dunderhead-proof method of application suits my personal situation too

Show off. Incredible work and attention to detail.

I'm still experimenting with it at this stage, so mistakes and tweaks will be expected for a while before I commit to some real cuts. In retrospect I could have lifted the text up about 1mm - the "A" is bang on the centreline, but the tail of the "g" dips lower, so the net effect is that the complete block of text looks like it's sitting low on the headstock. Spacing of the letters could also tighten up a bit to save some horizontal realestate. Need better cutters too. The ones that came with the unit are fine for learning the ropes, but far from ideal for inlay work.

Baby steps this week. Headstock cap and binding channels on neck no. 2 underway: The real reason behind my lack of progress - new tool day. Picked up a baby CNC machine from one of the numerous ebay Chinese sellers. This one has a usable bed of 200mm x 300mm. Mechanically it seems surprsingly robust. Electronics-wise it's pretty rudimentary. The controller board only has a parallel port interface which limits the connectivity somewhat, but the board has a number of unterminated solder pads for things like limit switches and control outputs. Spent the best part of a day retrofitting software control of the spindle. Next task - installing limit switches to the axes so that I don't do anything stoopit, like mash the gantry through the end stops. It may be small in size, but for what I'm planning for it (control cavity covers, smaller routing templates, headstock inlays, trussrod covers etc) it will fit the bill nicely. Test milling the logo into a pseudo headstock cap:

If you have any second hand stores or tool markets in your area you can occasionally find old clamps there for not much money. I recently picked up a pair of pipe clamps for $30 from a junk shop. The same units new are more like 3 times that price.

Nicely executed. Actually, I feel like a bit of a dope. If I'd bothered to examine the few posts above my last one properly instead of just skim-reading, I probably would've noticed that everyone was already saying the exact same thing as me anyway Ahem. Carry on.

Roarsome. Thanks Prostheta.

Cheers Scott. Gerald Scarfe's artwork on The Wall is a classic. The marching Irwins is a good analogy.

How deep is the gouge compared to the rest of the channel? Can you reshape the body around that edge and then re-cut the binding channel? If you take off as little as necessary and blend the reshaped area around the curve it may not be noticable.

Mods: can someone have a look at 87Kevin's entry? None of his attached images can be downloaded. When I click on one of them I get a "Sorry, you don't have permission for that" error page. His link to the external page on his site also gives a 404 error, which means that we have no way of knowing what the build looks like to vote on it.

It's come in handy for me when I needed to urgently stick something when I ran out of double sided tape. As you say, it is also brilliant as an alternative to adhesive sandpaper on the radius block or levelling beam. Sticky-backed sandpaper is a special order item down here, and I'd rather not pay a premium for such products and wait 2-3 weeks for it to turn up if I don't have to.

All the acrylic I get are offcuts from the local waste recycling centre; throw-away pieces that probably originally came from a glazier. That piece was about 300x600x10 when I bought it. Paid probably $20 for it at the time. Any time I go to the recycling depot I check to see what perspex offcuts are available and grab some if there's some useful sizes. No CNC here (yet). All I do is make up some guide templates using thin MDF or plywood, score the template pattern onto the perspex sheet with a scribe, cut and rasp away 99% of the shapes and finish off with the router+pattern bit+original MDF template. Provided I don't ask the router to work the acrylic too hard it shapes just as easy as timber, although the "shavings" become statically charged and end up sticking all over me. If you look back up the page where the neck is clamped into the red vise, under the workbench you can see the plywood guide template I made up to create the clear perspex master template for the body chambers.

Most doublesided tape from a hardware store will be fine. 3M make a good one. Might also be marketed as "carpet tape". Avoid the stuff that is quite thick and has a foam backing - it will allow the template to move laterally. Can't find double sided tape? I've had success using superglue and masking tape. Beware, use as little glue as possible as it holds the template like mad, and can be a nightmare to separate when you need to get the template off.

We're all always thinking about the next one...

Headstock bound: But is it art?: Lining up the neck pocket: A little bit of tape applied to the side pieces after the neck has been removed ensures a super snug fit when the router is run through: Check fit of the pickups: Used a bit of spare time to start on the doppelganger. This one is getting Lace Alumitones. No need for a battery compartment, hence I can put in an extra chamber where I would normally put the battery box at the bottom of the body:

Good to see another Aussie round these parts. Nice job on the kit. The colour is a good choice, even if it wasn't the one you picked to start with! So when are you going to build your next?

If it's a proper template drawing done as a PDF, DXF or other similar vector-based drawing it should be scaled to print at 1:1. Just select the appropriate scaling factor when you print it and you're good to go. If it is just a scan from a blueprint or image and you're lucky there may be a reference measurement shown on the drawing somewhere. Print out a test copy and measure this reference measurement as accurately as possible. Take the reference measurement printed on the drawing and divide it by the value that you measure it to be when it is printed. This is the scaling factor you need to apply to the image when you print it in order for it to come out at 1:1. Eg, if your test print of the reference measurement comes out at 70mm in length and the value shown on the drawing is 100mm, then your scaling factor is 100/70 = 1.429. Depending on the software this print scaling may be expressed in percentage, in which case just multiply by 100 (1.429 x 100 = 142.9%). If there are no useful dimensions on the drawing at all the best you can do is make a test print, measure some part of the drawing (eg, nut to 12th fret distance, width of body at widest part) and compare it to a measurement from the actual object it was created from. Make your scaling factor accordingly from those two measurements. Last resort is simply printing it and seeing how it looks compared to the real deal, and adjusting the print scale until it comes out near enough to the right size.

I can't help it. I'm a neatness freak

Drill your cavities with the forstener to your target depth minus a tad. The less you need to use a router bit to finish the cavity the easier it will be. Don't forget that the centre tip of the fostener bit will be slightly deeper than the main cutting area of the drill, so account for the extra depth of the divot when setting your drilling depth, otherwise the bottom of your routed cavity will be full of little dimples.

Thanks. Surprised to hear that you have eucalyptus growing locally. It's not normally used for anything more than hardware store-supplied building materials down here, but big burl slabs are fairly easy to come by. I hereby declare myself to be the "Chapped Chap".

The enclosed box idea possibly has merit when you're doing the hand sanding of a body, so don't throw the idea out straght away. Sanding timber throws up lots of superfine airborne dust, which at best settles on everything in the room, and at worst ends up in your lungs. Anything that limits the amount of dust that gets into the air before you have a chance to contain it is always a good thing. Shame. Maybe you could turn your doorstep into a woodworking street performance venue?

Agreed. When using high power/high speed cutting tools the last thing you want is not to be able to see what you're doing clearly, or have your movement restricted. You also have no way to secure the workpiece inside the box. The gloves in themselves are a hazard when using power tools. The curtained-off area inside the room is a good idea, although the dust will accumulate very quickly inside such a small enclosed space. Do you have any opportunity to work outside when using the router?