So, my XL is finally being used for somthing useful. Guitar prototypes for a kids charity promoting music appreciation and learning. We are planning to make variations of these for distribution all across the US and Canada. All the pieces will be made out of 100% recycled and re-purposed wood and materials. The humble XL is doing all the work now, but will move to production machines when we get approval. Fun learning curve…
Cheers,
Fred
Very nice Fred, congratulations on the initiative.
These look really good .I’ve been wanting to do a guitar but haven’t had the time. A couple questions below.
Are you going to flip to do the back of the neck? Are you going to do the frets with the shapeoko too?
Would you be willing to share the files, in STL format if possible? (trying to use fusion360 for my 3d stuff)
Hi,
The Tele files I bought from a guy in Spain so I can’t really share them, sorry. They are also in Vectric Aspire format. In any case, yes, I did the back carving too and it came out very nice, very little finish sanding. For the fret slots, I did not have the correct Stewie Mac 0.023" bit when I did this test, but tried it on a later Maple neck and it came out great. The only problem with milling fret slots is it is extremely slow. I mean really, really slow as the bit is so fragile. I’m going to make a CNC machine to automate the fret slotting using a 2-axis setup with a 0.021" slitting saw with a Arduino controller running grbl. I can program that to do any neck scale and accomodate anything from a mandolin to a bass neck. I prototyped it on the Shapeoko and it works great.
Cheers,
Fred
