Fixturing ideas and techniques

[turmite]

Hey guys I thought I would start this thread in hopes everyone might share ideas on fixturing guitar bodies and necks. Attached is a jpg of a bass I am doing now. It is a Mezzaluna design by R.M Motolla. I ask permission to use and change his design and he was very gracious.

If you will notice in this shot you will see three green circles that surround .5" holes. After the machining process that is shown in the pic I then machined the bottom plate with the holes in it as well. I have attached both the top and bottom plate. The next step was to build an elevated fixture with 6 .500" pins . Three pins will be for locating the body using the bottom and three will be for the top. This way I could machine from the top or bottom of the body and have perfect indexing. My original intent was to machine the neck dovetail joint both in the body and on the neck, glue the neck on and then machine the neck using this fixture. That would allow me to machine from the nut to the bridge keeping everything as close tolerence as possible. After read the post and seeing the pic gregmary put up on the LP thread I may re-think this. Anyway It seemed like a good idea at the time!

Mike