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

DRS Racks.com

Hi everyone, some of you may be following may remember the roll around rack I built to store guitars in progress. Well a friend of mine has been bugging me to build one for him... but something nice enough to please his wife. So one morning I woke up and realized what was wrong with my original rack, implemented some improvements and sent him pictures.

Well the response was SO positive that people coming by started wanting to buy racks as well. With so much interest we decided to launch www.drsracks.com So swing by and check out what else we are up to!!

Guitar-b-que 09!

So last Saturday we held our "Guitar-b-Que". We decided to have an open house to cut strat or tele bodies for people all day. Along with cutting bodies we drug out the Weber, cleared out some space in the front office for amps and threw a party!

Everything started here. You could see in my last post that Dave, Steve and I prepped a bunch of material. Dave and I spent most of the following week sending bodies through the wide belt to get them completely prepped.
Around 9:30 people started straggling in and sorting through blanks. I made some guides that showed the tooling path of the CNC.
Here is where I spent ALL day... standing in front of the CNC.
Strat style body about half way run. While this was going on the BBQ was fired up and food started to be cooked.


This made Charlie quite happy
She even made a new friend!
People scarfing down on some food
Guitars were EVERYWHERE! (keen eyes will notice the strat on the right is the "CourtneyCaster"
While everyone was enjoying some food Dad was flush trimming and edge routing bodies.
Cleaning up the neck pocket.
Running the round over

Then it was off to the dreaded part. Everyone was responsible for sanding their own bodies.
sanding.... so much sanding!

Now the REAL party room was our front office. The day before we gave it a much needed cleaning out and freed up some space for people to bring amps to try.
Mike from www.phatdaddyguitarworks.com came down with a Greer Amplification Thunderbolt 30. UNBELIEVABLE amp, already have one on order!
The black and wheat amp in the back corner is my new Greer Oktal Grinder. Another fantastic amp from Nick Greer!
Soon the guys from Brownnote showed up with 3-4 fantastic amps in tow and soon the "amp room" was so crowded you could barely stand in there!!
My Firebird got A LOT of play time during the day!
Dad and Charlie the Shop Dog
More people hanging out by the CNC watching their bodies run.
More Dad working hard. I have to say, Dad, Steve, Dave and even my wife and my mom worked their ARSES off during the day. We couldn't have done it with out their help.

After the BBQ the bar that Dave and I play at weekly hosted a jam for us. Unfortunetly only a few pictures turned out.

"Good night Sacramento, we love you!"

We did get some video though! Steve posted a lot of videos to his youtube account.. check them out!! Just don't hold my playing against me... I badly sliced 3 finger tips on my left hand during the bbq and was playing with band aids on!

Guitar-b-que

WAY behind on updates here. I've been lagging partially because there hasn't been a ton to show. Sealer and grain filling has been on the Firebird's but they are waiting for paint. Joes Thunderbird is cut out, I'll update that in a separate post.

In the mean time, we are having a BIG BBQ at the shop for guitar building hobbyists like ourselves. We stocked up on material and we'll be running bodies all day. Steve and I went out and picked up a truck load (literally) of Mahogany and Alder. Today, Steve, Dave and I started cleaning up the material and gluing them into billets.

ROUGH Mahogany. This is one of my favorite parts of woodworking... running nasty looking wood through the planner.

Steve and I are doing a light cleanup, getting the material down to about 1.85" thick.

Rough Mahogany in, clean Mahogany out :D

This is how we straight line. The jig at the front basically pinches the the board in, works really well. Nice thing is I can straight-line 10' boards here with out hassle.

I did have a couple 12 footers though, I chopped 2 feet out of them to straight-line separately.

Doug: "What does that mean?"
Dave: "Kauer Custom Instruments, duh!"

Once everything has been straight lined I run them back through the planer on edge to true the edges.

After the edges are trued, we started cutting them to length.

FILLED the rack with materials!

We only have so many clamps in the shop so we'd glue 2 billets at a time.

Steve digging through all the blanks to match them up into nice two piece bodies.

And there we go... All of the Mahogany ones are glued, a few of the alder ones started. Tomorrow we'll get another 10-12 alder ones glued up. After this everything goes through the widebelt till they are perfectly flat.

-d