So now that the intro is out of the way I thought we'd get caught up on the last couple weeks projects. I've decided that one Firebird simply isn't enough so I picked up another 24' of 8/4 African Mahogany. I am building a couple for friends and a Thunderbird for a friend.

I do the vast majority of my machining on our in house SCMI Tech99 CNC (Point to Point technically) router. The machine is from the mid 90's so its pretty antiquated by today's standards... but I can trick it into doing some of the more complicated things (like doing the radius on fretboards ect).

So I forgot to take pictures from raw wood stage but this as bodies started coming off the machine.

First batch coming off the CNC. From left to right its: My FirebirdJR, my Firebird VII (3x P90's), Daves Firebird VII (Mini Buckers), Dad's Firebird V (2 full size humbuckers) and my Firebird VII (3 fullsize 'buckers)


Now there are 2 more firebirds here... both for Nick Greer (www.greeramps.com). Though I accidently routed the trussrod to deep on one of them so I glued in a maple strip before rerouting. I actually think this is a blessing in disguise to help reinforce the neck.

All done waiting for the next step!

So this is the next step. What I do is back cut the necks to (more or less) the final thickness I want the neck to end up. What I do is build a couple jigs that have the amount of rise I want (in this case .15") to taper.

Since one of these is Dad's after all... and he was down at the shop anyways, I decided he had to do some of the leg work.