Chuck Marfione Guitar Neck Demo - CNC - Laguna Tools

warning warning hi I'm Chuck Murphy Owen and I'm a classical guitar maker I also make period style romantic guitars and here in this nice little compact shop sitting here in North Carolina on a hilltop looking at mountains which you can't see at the moment but in any event let me show you around what we have in here and you know we can start by just you know taking a look at all the different machines that are in the shop you know we're you know very Laguna centric so to speak here in the shop of almost all the power tools our Laguna Laguna tools and I love them they're great tools they've been very helpful you know we first we've got a 14 inch bandsaw and we also have a 10 inch a fusion table saw and over here we've got a combo planer jointer ten inch which is more than adequate for the type of work that I do if I was a furniture maker I would probably want something a little bit bigger than this and over here is the CNC machine which is my pride and joy do a lot of work on this and continuing to do more and you know a little bit later on and this presentation will show you you know how it works and what we do want it well there are a number of different approaches to building guitars you know some builders you don't need to to build by hand because they feel it's important for them to be in touch with the wood in order for them to build the really great guitar you know other builders they tend to focus more on machineries and and automation because they're in a more of a let's say a production mode I tend to be in the middle I like to take advantage of all of the technology but at the same time I also I too want to be in touch with the with with my guitars and that does occur when you're building by hand so it's been a healthy marriage between the technology and the tradition and I'm very comfortable in that particular position I'm using two really fine software packages to model and also to put together all the machine operations for my projects I use a Rhino a Rhino CAD for all of my modelling it has a fairly steep learning curve but yet at the same time it's extremely powerful and once you really learn your way around it it's a great tool you know for a for my machine operations I'm using Rhino cam which is a produced by a company called MEK soft and again it's another one with a not a steep learning curve as rhino but it does take some time to get used to it but very flexible and the service and support from from the Mex off people as well as the Rhino or McNeal folks is really solid today we're gonna look at how I create a guitar neck on the CNC machine the CNC machine is an important part of my overall build process and what I've had to do is develop a number of different hold down methodologies to safely you know keep these parts in place during the machining processes the majority of the work I'm doing is a held in place with vacuum systems as opposed to either double sided tape or mechanical clamps I find this to be a very safe and effective way to do and you know it really you know makes a lot of sense because essentially I don't have to worry about the tool dodging around or physical clamps which is a you know really something to be concerned about so what we have here is the table which is the stack table that comes with an IQ and I've removed some of the some of the spoil boards which were stock item and then when I started to do is actually make a whole bunch of positioning about the holes here in the table which I worked out with my with my camp program and these will make a lot more sense as we get into the explanations of some of the different whole townships I use but you know these are all predetermined and very accurately a actually brought into the table and then what I do is I used threaded inserts this gives me really great registration and the repeatability of you know my ability to read to be able to repeat these processes time and time again has been you know just really phenomenal this is the primary jig that I use to machine out the Lakota necks for my guitars so I'm just just lining this up with these pre-drilled holes with the threaded inserts and what I'm going to do is you know bolt this down with some stainless steel bolts now I don't take these all the way down yet I want to get them you know kind of finger tight and then I'll do my final adjustments so that this is very little if any one shouldn't have any boat where warp in it when I finally tighten it down totally I'm going to remove this piece this is a vestige from an earlier process so we no longer need it so I'm going to insert these little 1/8 inch pins which are readily available even at a service star hardware store into these two little index holes and what you can do is gonna match up with these two index holes on my left blank so all we need to do is just line these up and that's always the fun part is just lining these things these two holes up so now it's there as you can see it just lifts up there's nothing holding this down we're gonna turn on some vacuum and now we're gonna have this thing ready to go and to hold down for a machining process we've got this tube which is running out to a vacuum pump and I've got a small shutoff valve here which allows me to take into control when the vacuum is active and when it's not what I'll do is I'll just turn this on here and just give this a tap and now what I've got is this piece is being held down here nice and firm but we're just this little bit of vacuum this is the first step in preparing and neck for machining on the CNC machine what we need to do is put in a number of reference reference holes or index holes so that we can position the part consistently throughout the entire machining process so what I'm going to be doing right now is just setting up the bit you know doing a tool touch off here so that the the the machine knows exactly where the top of the part is and then we're going to start running some little routines in here to to a complete putting all the indexing in for this for this part the this particular IQ is controlled with a small handheld controller and this allows me to instruct the machine to perform certain process these machining processes so what we're going to do again as I'd mentioned earlier is we're going to put a couple more indexing holes in here these particular flats will be used to position the neck during the the headstock gluing stage you can see I've already put in a couple of other holes which are the actual index holes which are used to hold the neck in place on the jig for the actual shaft machining as well I'm going to take about three or four millimeters off of this blank here just so it's a little bit easier to to actually do the final skim cut to get my thickness for these neck points so I'm getting prepared to do the first of the real machining processes which is we're going to fly cut the top of this for two to get a final thickness for the blank normally I wouldn't run this without a dust shroud on it but if we have the shroud on you really wouldn't be able to see what's happening so just for instructional purposes were we're keeping this the shroud off by the way just a word of caution and it is where your safety glasses I almost always wear that and I just happened to forget them so I'm gonna put these on right now for the rest of this process now we're ready to profile this piece I've changed my bit and we'll let it roll here and then we can see what it looks like in a it'll begin to look more like a neck right now it just looks like a block of wood okay Lee no that's that's 15,000 rpms there oh that's excellent that's excellent to know all right well again Lee know this is a very informative this will help us make all the appropriate adjustments so we can really zero in on the right feeds and speeds here all right have a great day all right bye now that's what I love about Laguna I could just call and I can get answers what's cutting pretty good here we've got a nice we're getting a good profile here this starting to look like a neck and get rid of all of this excess material so that we you know don't have to really tax the Machine as we get into the real detail type of machining we're profiling the neck you know from a vertical perspective okay the next step here is to create the Murphy own V joint and this is a V joint that I've developed for these local guitars to make it a little bit easier to put the headstock and the next shaft together this is also a series of operations going on here all this you know one right after another as opposed to actually stopping and starting and stopping and starting and stopping starting because I'm using one bit I can bundle all of these operations together continuous flow we're now moving into the final stage of shaping the neck and essentially we've got the blank you know as you can see it's we've taken off all of the excess material so that this finishing bit will now just be working with a minimal amount of material you know in terms of actually cutting a cutting you just don't want to put a lot of stress on these bits even though the Machine and the bit will take it this is what we ultimately end up with for for a blank so we'll walk through all the steps to get to this point we're good to go here I'm now going to put the piece onto the fixture here and we'll turn on the vacuum just give it a good hit to make sure that we've got a good firm seal and sound there nicely and we're gonna zero out the machine I've just made a tool change and I've got a tapered bit on here now which is a very fine and what we're going to do next here is further define the the volute area here and now there's still a little bit of handwork that needs to be done as you can see over here what I've done is I've actually stopped the the bit just a bit short here so that essentially what we can do is take in with it with a real sharp chisel we'll just take and clean this this out here and as well what I'll do is I'll come in here and I will just square this up so that when my with my back plate of ebony or rosewood is fits on top of this it gets a nice tight square fit well we're moving on to the headstock right now and one of the first operations that will take care of is we're gonna fly cut the top of this piece so we can get it down to the appropriate thickness now this could be done with a with a sander but I prefer doing it on the CNC machine just because I can get it so close we're moving on to the second stage of the creation of the headstock here and what we're going to do with this operation is take knowledge you take a majority the material off you know around the sides of this of this headstock blank in preparation for final profiling to its finished size right now that we've removed a majority of the excess material from this headstock we're going to move on to the next stage which is to actually do the finish profiling and as well we're going to start working on creating the the mortise here all right we're on the last step here of creating this head stock piece and we've made a tool change we're now using a tapered ball mill and the majority of the work here is going to be on the the actual loop on mortise here and around these edges which will then be joined up against the mating edge of the of the actual next shift all right so we've now completed the the headstock piece and we're gonna do it just a preliminary test here to see how well it fits with the with the tenon we know that we're going to have to do a little bit of light sanding you know would 400 or 600 sandpaper to do a final fit but we should be pretty close here so we're just going to pull this off and sometimes they don't want to come off in this case we it's pegs here alright I'm just gonna take them do a little bit of cleaning here maybe see how nice and clean that joint is and let's give it a test fit and see how well we're doing here okay okay so you can see here is we're gonna have to do a little bit of sanding alright but yet at the same time we're pretty darn close alright we've moved on to creating the tenon here on our neck and you'll notice here that we're using a vertical fixture and this allows me the machine in the vertical position as opposed to the normal horizontal position of this work surface you know this was required because of the fact that I do not have a 4 axis machine and this is a great way to approach this problem or challenge more than a problem so let's get started then we'll run this and see how it works we're doing here it's just kind of clearing out that fill it and also defining the fatwa of the hill I admit another tool change and we're going to do is refine this tenon and the heel of the back heel wall with these sets of operations here but we've made another tool change we put a tape with ball mill on here and what we're going to do is refine this fill it here right at the tip of this tenon all right we've made another tool change we're back to our 20 to 40 3/8 inch ball mill and we're going to use that to refine even further the back wall of this of this heel I just want to point out here that what I've done is really defined this this back wall of the of the heal itself and I'm trying to do a little bit of pre-planning here so that essentially when we start machining the actual heal out that I don't have a lot of potential for tear out from from my bit as it's you know working this the shaping of the heal so we're going to do this now on the other side and then we'll move on to the next operation right this is the last operation that we're going to perform in a vertical position what we're going to do is drill to ten and bolt holes right here in the tenant all right we're down to the last stage here of the machining on this neck and that is what we're gonna do at this point is machine out the actual heel so there's a couple of different steps to this we're going to be using a fairly large bit we're going to be taking a lot of material off and we're done well we've got a finished neck here there is still a little bit of work that'll need to be done on it in terms of some fine sanding around here in the transition area and we do have one more operation to perform on this and and that will be to take and make the of the horizontal or I should say well it depends on how you're looking at this the tenon holes here for the two the two barrel nuts that will fit in here which will hold the bolts which actually will bolt into the into the heel block so why don't I set that up and you take a quick look again use a nice in uniform and we've got a successful neck alright we've set up the the fixture for the last operation in this in this neck of production sequence and we've done is put this bracket on our basic vacuum table fixture now this is capable of working under vacuum but I prefer to use the clamp only because there's a fair amount of downward pressure here and I think just for safety's sake I much prefer just using the clamp well I hope you've enjoyed watching the process of me pulling together a neck on the CNC machine it's a it's quite an experience that I've had over the months and actually it years trying to you know really work through a lot of these issues and challenges one thing I'd like to make make clear is is that we're a development shop as much as we are a production that is a mini production shop if you have any questions or comments you can certainly give me a call or reach me through my website at Murphy owned guitars calm and if you're interested in learning more about some great tools then you should really talk to the Laguna folks or great folks tour thanks a lot you

Channel: Laguna Tools

Views: 26,888

Keywords: laguna tools, woodworking, woodworking machinery, laguna, cnc, laguna cnc, cnc guitar, cnc guitar neck, guitar neck, cnc demo, chuck marfione, laguna iq cnc, iq cnc, iq router, cnc router, cnc table, cnc woodworking, cnc guitarmaking, cnc fixtures, cnc machine, cnc guitar maker, Guitar (Musical Instrument)

Id: -p0D82otZwQ

Length: 32min 0sec (1920 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 17 2015