a minor firebird update...

Murphy left the area long enough to get color on this firebird... for the third or fourth attempt now. Huzzah!

5/28: almost done with clear, had to roll it outside with the good camera for a real picture.

4442-2

Small update for today... got the semi hollow's misshapen top off, recapped and rerun. Came out pretty nice!

the start of 4442...

Well, its time to introduce a new project that I've started calling the Daylighter after my absolute favorite Steam Engine ever. Ever ever. Its been kicking around in my head for quite some time but I finally took the plunge and started up this last weekend.

The initial CAD drawings I made up. Now there is some tricky things here due to the way our CNC works. Because its a 3 axis only, the router always cuts at a 90* angle to the table. This is fine 99% of the time except for a guitar that has a sloped cap that matches the neck angle. So I'd been mulling this over for quite some time how to solve this problem.

First we glued up some blanks and caps. Im using something new (to us), Wormwood Maple. Its really neat stuff, some spalting, some figuring its really nice stuff.

I decided to build two of them this time, one full solid and one semi-hollow. They are from the exact same pieces of Mahogany and Maple so it will be interesting to compare them tone wise. I won't lie, my back will prefer the semi-hollow!

Gluing the caps on. Can never have enough clamps... though I really need to get my vaccum bag setup running again.

This is coming back to my problem on the CNC. The solution came from a friend and really was a simple solution. Build a simple ramped spoiler board that creates the angle I need to mill the neck angle, pickup pockets and neck pocket. Now I *can* mill the angle right off the face of the guitar but the problem is the pickup pockets will "lean back". This solves that issue.

"ramped" on the CNC, working like a charm.

Off the CNC you can see the angles and pockets cut. I couldn't be more pleased and it keeps right in line with the Keep It Simple Stupid solution. From here it goes back on, flat like normal to cut the carve, shape of the body and bridge placements.

Now I said I did two... this if the first one. 90% of this went off with out a hitch but I got a bit overzealous and ran this with out doing mockups. Well I goofed up the carve program and it ran right through pickup routings. D'OH! No biggie, I'll plane the top off run it again with the fixed programs.

After fixing the carve programs I ran the second body and it ran with out a hitch. Its tough to see but this is how the carve comes out straight out of the cnc. From here I just blend it out with 120 grit on a palm sander.

There we go, basically sanded and ready for the next steps (making the necks).

and a shot of the back. Really nice tight grained African Mahogany here. Well till next time folks... :D