My introduction, CNC for guitars, etc

[Kosh]

Greetings all.

Just thought I'd delurk here and introduce myself. I'm a long time woodworker and amateur luthier. I've built two guitars so far, and am just starting on my 3rd and 4th this week.

I've been toying with the idea of either buying or building a CNC machine for making certain parts of guitars. I've been a software engineer for 20 years now, and the idea of using CNC to accurately machine parts is quite attractive to the geek side of me!

However, as one other poster in this forum pointed out, it can easily take longer to do it with CNC than by hand. Also, at the volumes I'm looking at, it's tough to justify the costs to buy or the time to build one right now. For now, I've chosen instead to farm out any CNC work, or better yet, to have templates produced on a CNC machine. One of my friends and fellow luthiers is using his shopbot to generate both spec and custom parts for luthiers. Right now he's CNCing me a new headstock template, bridge template, and curve templates (for the curvature on the top and bottom plates of acoustic guitars). These will all be used for template routing to make the parts that I need. Cost will probably be about $100 total, but that's much less than 6K + software for a shopbot!

Anyway, I've got a couple web pages up on building guitars, showing both finished pictures and step by step maching processes for assembly. The page for the second isn't finished yet and it's WAY out of date, maybe I'll get it done tomorrow! So there are also some links to the finished pictures of that guitar.



First Guitar
Second Guitar
Finished pic
Finished pic
Finished pic

[santiniuk]

Mark,

Just have to say that after visiting your site you have produced some stunning work.

You should be really proud.

Cheers

[CJL5585]

Your guitars are georgeous. Love the 6 string. Kinda resembles an old Martin.
Jerry

[Kosh]

Originally Posted by CJL5585 Your guitars are georgeous. Love the 6 string. Kinda resembles an old Martin. Jerry

Thanks. It uh, er, uh, may have been traced off my old Talkamine (seen in the background of one picture) which was copied off an old Martin...

I just brought the waist in an extra inch, 'cause I like my women svelt...

[ger21]

I think the main benefit of CNC for acoustic guitars, would be carving the neck. Most of the work in building an acoustic is handwork Look around in the DIY wood router forum here. A lot of guys have built machines capable of carving necks for well under $1000. I noticed on your site, that you use TurboCAD. If you have a version that does 3D, you wouldn't need more than $200 in software to do it.