Guitars in Fusion 360 | Part 3 - Shaping the Body & Neck Transition

hello everyone my name is austin shainer and welcome back to my channel thank you for joining me on my third episode of how to build a guitar in fusion 360. for those of you just joining us i'm gonna do a real quick recap so in episode one we laid out some of our foundational sketches so we did our fretboard schematic i showed you how to draw a rough headstock and we also drew in the body and the whole point of that doing all those sketches up front was so that we could set ourselves up for success in the rest of the model in episode 2 we did our first extrusion so we got the main thickness of the body in place we got our neck pocket cut and then we started talking about how we were going to shape the body and that had some additional constraints that we had to think about so i needed to actually take a little bit of a diversion and talk about how lofting works and i went into that in quite great detail so if you haven't seen that episode i really recommend that you watch that before this one because today we're going to really put that tool to work and so what i'm hoping to do let me pull up my model here was i'm really hoping to get the majority of this body modeled and then start working on the neck transition here this back relief cut and the neck transition hopefully i'll have time to do all that so what i'm going to try to do if i can is when it comes to shaping the body i might not do quite as much explaining as i normally do now that because i've done a lot of that in the last episode so hopefully today we can really put some work in and get the body done that being said if you see me doing something that you didn't quite understand and i didn't explain it please leave me a comment down below and i will make sure i answer that for you all right let's get to work before we start cutting into the body we really have one more decision to make are we going to build our guitar body out of one material such as mahogany or maple or are you masochists out there aluminum or steel some people do it or we kind of build it out of two types of materials so such as a laminated top guitar so like in my design i have a walnut top and a mahogany bottom or you could have like a maple top and a walnut bottom it doesn't matter it could be the same material it's really whatever you prefer but for those of you who would like to go this route there's one extra step that we need to do before we start cutting into the top we need to actually create this as a new component so that way we can cut through both at the same time and also apply a different appearance to each one so that way you get the look you want in the end i realize for those of you who want to build this out of a single material this might be an unnecessary step but for those of you who do want to go that route i think it's worth showing you how to do this first the kenai observers among you might notice that actually my neck is sitting a little bit proud of my body and actually my fretboard sketch now in episode 2 we actually extruded it directly from the fretboard sketch those two are coplanar and that actually presents a problem because the neck typically wants to sit a little bit proud of the body because you'll also have the quarter inch fretboard on top and that is if you're like i said in the first or second video if you're using a hip shot bridge that'll give you the right string height so what we actually need to do is come in here and we need to correct that so we need to extrude this down away from the fretboard sketch by at least so by an eighth of an inch if you're going to be building the body out of one material and if you're going to be building the body out of two materials like a laminated top you'll want to do an eighth of an inch plus the thickness of your laminated top so again if you'd like to just do one one style body you bring that down an eighth of an inch and then you can actually come back to your neck pocket and bring that down an additional eighth of an inch oop i messed that up so we'll go 0.75 so what that does is that maintains our 5 8 depth on the neck but it also brings this down by about an eighth of an inch that way the neck sits a little bit proud for those of you who are doing the split top or the laminated top what we just need to do is come back to this cut or sorry this offset and we'll go the thickness of the material for the laminated top plus an eighth of an inch so if we use a quarter inch laminated top will go negative 0.375 creating the laminated top is actually very easy so we're going to do is we're going to create a new component so let's go create new component just hit ok and then we're going to do is we're going to sketch on this top surface of the body that we just offset and corrected now let's click on the main surface and we're notice it's not picking up the neck pocket which is good so let's hit p for project bring that into our sketch hit q on your keyboard for press pull or you can go solid extrude grab that face and come up the thickness of your laminated top so 0.25 so now you'll notice we actually have two separate pieces here and this already has the shape of the body that we created in episode two you'll notice however that it can move so we need to make sure that's joined to the body so click that face and this face come up hit assemble joint and it'll automatically snap because it's exactly the same shape it'll snap on center so we can just hit ok so now we've actually got our laminated top our bottom and we've got the gap here for the neck now to make things a bit easier on us going forward i personally like to go ahead and apply a either a color or an appearance to that laminated top so that way when i'm cutting through everything i can clearly identify what portions i'm seeing because sometimes when everything is the same color it kind of all blends together and you kind of lose track of just like the proportions of everything so let's go and hit a on our keyboard and let's grab an appearance you can apply a wood appearance at this point if you'd like or whatever material you're using but i'm just going to pick a color so i'm just going to grab green let's go paint green now i'm going to change this later of course but what that does it just gives us some really nice contrast so that way we can clearly visualize what's happening in the cut all right let's start cutting so first things first i'm going to lay out the rails like in episode 2 i prefer to do the rails first when it comes to the body but you can draw the profiles if you'd like if that's the direction you want to go but like i showed with the three-point plane method that seems to work really well for the body so let's go ahead and do that so let me hit sketch and we'll sketch on top of the laminated top or on top of your unified surface if that's the direction you want so let's go ahead and first before we do anything click the surface hit p and project that into the sketch so now let's hit arc and let's start getting a rough shape in place before we add any dimensions so there so those two are tangent but it doesn't know where it is in space yet so this line can move this point can move this point to move and these two radiuses haven't been defined yet so let's give this a radius of 5 inches actually let's step back see sometimes when you just start adding dimensions things can go crazy so we need to constrain this a little bit so i know at least for my personal taste i would like this point to come straight out kind of in a perpendicular fashion out from these two arcs but there's not really a good way of defining where that is because you don't have two straight lines you have two arcs so how do you do that what i'm going to do is i'm going to draw a line here i'm going to create a triangle and i'm going to make these two line segments equal and i'm going to make each one of these tangent to that circle that it's closest to and what that does is it gives me kind of like a projected view if you imagine like your eye looking out there's a center line somewhere in there so if i draw from this point to that center mark i now have the center point between those two so let me make these construction lines and let's make this coincident to that point so that point is going to end directly in line with where these two arcs meet let's say if i offset those two so let's go ahead and give that a dimension of let's say one inch and so that's where that line is going to start now we can probably start messing with the constraints here so let's dimension from this point to this point let's do 0.625 and let's give this a radius let's say 5 inches i want it to be up a little higher that's starting to look pretty good but where are we missing it's not black yet okay so this radius can still change and this point can still move i bet if i just defined that point it'll fully constrain everything so let's dimension between these two let's do one and a quarter and i bet it can still move down yep so let's dimension between those two 1.25 perfect okay so now we have a fully defined top rail in order to save the amount of sketches that we're going to make because we're going to make a lot of sketches in this design i'm going to draw both rails on the same sketch you can actually do that and just only use a portion of that rail or a portion of that line for the rail so let me start the next one so let's go here like that start getting some rough lines in place like we did before and like that and let's come all the way down to here let's delete some of these tangencies real quick so that way we don't get a little messed up now where do we want this point to fall and what do we want this diameter to be let's make these two concentric okay so that way they're equal and we can see actually a line here and drawing straight from here so that's actually what i'm going to do is i'm going to draw a line from here and a line to this point make these both construction lines and make those collinear so that way it's drawing a straight line from the center of that arc through the edge of this one and into the edge of this one and that's giving me a nice um a nice concentric shape there and easy and easy to define which is nice okay so let's start working on the bottom the more that i'm looking at this i actually am just going to delete these two right here because i have a feeling that as i start giving those dimensions they're going to start you know creating circles and going everywhere so let's define our two end points first and so that way it's much easier to constrain the ones in the middle so let's go ahead and make this one concentric to that let's bring that up and let's define the distance between these two points so let's do the same thing we did above as 0.625 and let's make this vertical to here okay so that's fully defined let's make these two concentric and do something kind of similar i'm going to leave this one open for now because i don't know where i want the bottom of that arc to land so let's hit arc and let's draw between here let's make sure that's tangent yep that's tangent to there and let's draw from here to here and let's do that and let's make these two tangent and these two tangent okay so now we kind of have the same situation we had above where this point can move and that point can move so where do we want that to fall so let's find some easy points that we can identify here let's make let's see here let's make the center of this arc vertical to the center of that arc and then let's draw a line from here to the edge and make these two tangent okay so now what we need to do actually i changed my mind so we're going to delete this line and what we're going to do is we're just going to dimension this radius here i think that's going to be yeah this will be way easier so let's give that let's see two inches nope that's too much let's do 1.75 it looks pretty good actually so we've got a nice cut here a nice cut here and it gets a little bit bigger down at those bottom radiuses and comes in i'm pretty happy with that so going over this again i know i rushed through this and i mentioned in the beginning of the video that i'm gonna rush through some of this but basically i drew some arcs and i clearly identified where this point that's just in midair is gonna land and then i started constraining everything and that's going to give me some pretty nice rails to work with so let's go and hit finish sketch and just like in video 2 we now have a rail here we have a rail here we have a rail going all the way around here and that's going to set a nice foundation for us to draw some triangles and cut through so the next thing we need to do is we need to establish our plane somewhere lower so let's go ahead and hit offset plane from the top surface and we know since we're doing a laminated top we want it to cut through both surfaces so it at least has to be the thickness of the laminated top so let's actually just double that let's go to negative point five inches hit okay now we've got a surface that'll cut through a quarter inch of the base material and a quarter inch of the laminated top let's go ahead and hit sketch let's click let's actually select these lines instead of the face now that we have multiple bodies there hit p for project and now we've got our rail here on the bottom so we've got three points here potentially three points here i might have to need to add another point there same thing here same thing here all the way around probably need to add a point there and a point there so let's go back to our sketch let's set ourselves up for a loft actually that's the other one okay so let's make sure we add some points this is probably not necessary because you can typically grab off these locations but i want to add a point to be sure that those are all going to land where i want them to so let's add a point here let's add a point no add a point here add a point there so we have a triangle here triangle here triangle there this one might be a little tricky where i can add a point to i'll have to come back to that okay hit finish and let's go back to this sketch and let's make sure we have enough points there so yep we've got one two three this one might get a little tricky we'll have to play with that a bit later one two three one two i didn't add one there so let's go back add a point to here so now we've got one two three we've got one two three and one two three okay let's try that for now and if we need to come back and fix this one we can so i'm already noticing something so if i create a triangle between these three right here let's look at this from the top view imagine i drew a straight line between these that's actually going to clip off this little radius here so i'm actually going to have to extend these lines out a little bit so that way the cut starts on the outside of the body and goes in rather than starts on the inside of the body because then i'll have a little bit of material here that never got cut so let's go back to our sketch actually the first one there we go create two more arcs let's draw like that tangent and tangent let's make sure these are concentric and let's make sure this one is concentric oh i'm just going to delete that one and try again create arc make sure this is concentric there we go and let's go ahead and make these two vertical to each other so vertical okay and then let's define how far away from this surface is that going to be let's just say 0.5 okay and then let's come up up here i don't think i need to do it on this one because this one comes tangent but i'm going to do it anyway just to be sure so i don't have to do extra work later so i'm going to extend these ones out as well come out here let's make these tangents and concentric ooh okay there we go bring that back in these two tangent and that's already tangent and concentric make these two vertical and define from our shortest point point five okay now we need to go back to the other sketch and make sure those are also projected in so project and project so that way on the endpoints we have three points here and three points here okay i think we're almost ready to start cutting all right this might be the most tedious step but i'm going to go ahead and add in the planes and start connecting all the dots so let's go construct plane at three points from here here and here hit okay construct plane through three points between here here and here okay i'm just going to go ahead and do this to every one of these now you might not actually need to do that you might try it first by seeing how it interacts without having to do that but i'm going to go ahead and just draw it at every one that i have a solid three point set so bear with me here for a second and three three points these three between these three we're going to skip that one for now still might have to come back to it later three points here here and here playing through three points here here and here come around do these ones three points oh undo let's hide the body it's not letting me select it come on construct plane through three points here here and here there we go okay that should give us more than enough to get started and then we can see how it's interacting a little bit later so let's go ahead and hit sketch on this one and connect the dots there we go oh i apologize if this is going to take a little while this is the most tedious part of lofting in my opinion is to get all these connected so bear with me here i might do a time lapse phew that took a while thank you for bearing with me on that so let's go ahead and try to loft now one thing i want to note before we do this is that i'm going to do this in two lofts and i want to explain why so lofts really like to have a smooth trajectory from one place to another they don't really like to change directions abruptly so you'll notice i've got straight tangent lines going all the way through they're all connected up until here and then it goes a vastly different direction that's a good indicator for me that i need to do this in two lofts there are ways to do that in a single loft but generally not when you're trying to follow a path like this if you were to do it that way you'd probably want to use this whole surface as one of your profiles and then draw construction lines down vertically to here and loft between those two surfaces that's totally doable and that's a valid way of doing this i personally prefer this method because i have more control over the shape i feel like so let's go ahead and try to set up our loft but first let's come up here let's hide our bodies actually we need to show this but we need to hide that body okay create loft we want to go from this triangle to this triangle to that triangle to this one remember we're doing these in order from here up until there okay now i just noticed something that i missed and this happens quite a lot when you're doing lofting i don't have an arc coming from here to here somehow that did not get projected in so i need to cancel i need to go back to that sketch which i believe is right here see where i insert my plane okay it's this sketch right here somehow this line did not get projected in okay good so now my rail goes all the way to the end so let's go back and then slop this again create loft from here to here to here to here all the way around to here to there okay now it's not finished yet we got to add our rails so let's go guide type rails not centerline and let's do let's keep change selection on for now and see what happens so let's go that's not liking it what is why is that not grabbing it oh i'm just an idiot okay change selection nope not gonna like it let's do that one that one now it's telling you it's missing between these points so that one that one this one and that one okay that one should be good so now let's grab a new rail right here here here here here and here let's grab a third rail and go from here to here to here here here and grab that last one okay let's bring our bodies back that's looking pretty good i might have done this on the first try okay hit okay let's let this cut okay let's take a closer look at this make sure we didn't miss anything so we've got a nice clean triangle there do we have any cusps anywhere that actually turned out really nice okay we got a little one right there i'm not too concerned about that to be honest i think that's because we didn't have another triangle forcing this into shape so you can see here i had a straight line this one's a little squiggly i might go back and fix that a little bit later but i think i'm going to move on for now okay so let's do the second loft so let's go let's hide these bodies again and let's go show all these sketches and let's lofts number two create loft from this triangle to this one to this one to that one and let's do our rails so from here to here to there rail number two is from here to there to there and rail number three is from here to here to there okay i think that's going to work let's go unhide our bodies make sure everything's cutting yep it's creating a nice crisp line there this one's looking pretty good i think we did all right okay let's close it out let's hide our sketches see what we've got awesome so yeah i think long term i'm gonna have to go ahead and fix that line because i didn't define it so it's warping a little bit around that corner you can see that that curve there but everything else that i defined looks really nice so i'm happy with that so let's go ahead and project that actually not project that's the wrong term let's mirror these lofts to the back side so that we don't have to we don't have to do our work twice now some designs will have unique cuts on both the back and the front in my particular design i wanted to have the same cuts on both sides so it would thin it out at my shoulder area and thin it out at my leg without it being you know big swooping cut like you see on like fenders and stuff so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a mid plane so let's go construct mid plane between here and here okay you can see it's a little bit lower because we went down a quarter and a quarter it looks like we've got maybe 3 16 or something in between there let's hit ok and what i want to do is i want to take these two lofted features click both hold shift and click both of those come up to create mirror hit mirror plane that's going to be the mid plane that we just chose and you can see what it's going to do might be kind of hard to see here but it's going to take those exact cuts and mirror them to the other side of the design so let's see i'm going to change this to optimize so make sure it cuts let's see what happens i'll be right back with you my computer is frozen two hours later all right i'm finally back that took forever and i think i might have figured out why my computer kept freezing so sometimes when you do a mirror there are different types of compute options and optimized is typically the fastest because it just kind of mirrors the faces over i think that was the wrong choice in my case because i actually had two competing faces because i had the laminated top and the body and it was trying to add those faces to the other side whereas when i did adjust it computed almost right away but it took me probably 12 times restarting fusion 360 and i finally got it so sometimes fusion just does not like the answer and cannot solve it um or like what you're trying to do and can't solve it so that's how i ended up doing it it finally worked and i finally got those relief cuts on the back side let me hide the construction plane and you can see what happened now i would like to also point out that this is a good lesson so make sure you always save your documents because in that time on the original crash and i've restarted it i hadn't saved it and i had to actually go back in and redo my lofts thankfully i didn't have to redo all of my sketches but i had to redo my lofts and fix some things and so i actually went ahead and fixed that squiggly area as well that we were seeing before and cleaned up some of the other sketches that i had in there but i finally got it working and here we are so we now have the compound curves that i was looking for the relief cuts in my body it is identical on both sides so you can see i only had to do the the major work on one side so now we've actually got a pretty decent looking body now remember we've left this back edge for when we start the neck but so far i'm pretty happy so now i think we got enough of the body in place where we can really start working on the neck right we've left this back area open so we can do that and we haven't put any fillets in on these shapes that we've cut so that way we still retain all of our harsh edge anchor points that we can anchor this neck transition to if we applied the fillets let's say i rounded over all of these and let's do this one and this one give it a quarter inch round over you'll notice i lost my anchor points there they're now rounded over and so i actually want to retain those right now because i want to be able to connect to this dot or connect to that dot so where do we start well the first thing we're going to need to do is we're going to need to establish where the neck starts and where where the portion we're going to be modeling ends right so i know that my neck is going to start all the way in the back of the pocket and that it needs to end well not the whole neck but the part that we're modeling right now needs to end wherever the last piece is touching the neck so if you have a wing on your guitar that's unlike mine where it actually comes out here like a fender then you would place yours at the last point that it starts the neck but on my case since my wing actually touches the neck all the way out to here i need to start i need to start my neck right here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to open up my original master sketch of my fretboard i probably need to remember which fret that's on so that's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ten in from the back so one two three four five six seven eight nine ten right here i want to unmake that a construction line i want to turn that into a solid line so if i select that line hit construction that now creates a section or a sketch that i can now highlight right so if i turn that back it now highlights the entire section because the construction line wasn't interfering but if i turn that off now i can highlight that section and if i come back to my model you'll notice that now right here i've got a perfect square that follows the contour of my body so if i extrude that up right here let's go to object right here up you'll notice now we've got a block that we can cut out i did make a mistake right there and we need to create a new component first we don't want to add a body to the body so let's go ahead and hit create new component let's name it neck and inside neck we'll go ahead and highlight this extruded up oop misclicked extrude that up to object and we want to extrude it to that surface okay so now we've got our block that we can cut out so now we need to start envisioning okay what is that transition going to look like right so if i have a step here let's go to my well yeah let's go to my other design so in mind i've got a step and so i don't want this to this transition right here between these two surfaces to feel uncomfortable so i know that i want that line to go tangent to right here so that way you can see there's a nice smooth transition from all angles now if you didn't have a step there then you might approach it a little differently and i'll go over that let's try the step version first and then i can show you the other one so what i want to do is i want to sketch well let's open up our fretboard sketch again there we go so i want to sketch on this surface let's change that orientation and what i want to do is i want to create an arc or whatever shape you want your neck to be let's project in that face real quick arc here and bring that up okay now i'm going to tell this arc and this line to be midpoint right so you could make that lower because that means there's going to be no taper to the neck from here to here so if you wanted to you could make that a little bit lower i personally chose to just for the simplicity of the loft to leave from here here flat with no taper so i've made that midpoint let's make these two horizontal oh they already are okay and then where do we want that to connect to so i want that to connect to the top of this laminated top so let's click that project that dot in make those coincident okay now i've got a fully defined arc so you can see that this is really what the if i were to like let's say extrude that out the neck starts to take shape now we're not going to do that yet because we're focusing just on the transition so what i want to do is i want to take this section out right so if i cut this back let's say i just cut that back all the way to there the problem you run into two problems a because the neck has a taper to it you've got a clip here right where it clipped off part of the material and then b we need it to stop only at that line so bring in the lofts so what we're gonna do is now we're going to finish that sketch actually let's connect these two right here and these two right here like that hit finish so now we've got our main profile and we've conveniently got the first profiles that we want to cut from so now what we want to do is we want to sketch on this surface and let's give ourselves a midpoint here like that and find the midpoint draw a line out and we want it to connect to that center of that arc now again this depends on your design you may not have that feature right there but if you can manage to design it where you have that feature it makes this much easier so project in that point and i want to connect that point and i want to project in no i do not want to project that in right now i'll show you why in a minute and then i want to yeah let's just finish that sketch so now i've got one rail so here's my triangle i've got one rail here i have potentially another rail here but i'm gonna need to change that a little bit and then i don't have a rail here so let's go ahead and sketch oop wrong surface let's sketch on this surface reorient ourselves here i know i can turn that off but sometimes it's useful so what i want to do is i want to project in this point and i want to project in this point so we want this to continue back to here and then we want an arc between here i'm going to just draw it like that for now let's project in this line and we'll make these two tangent and then let's make these two tangents so it's a nice smooth transition okay so what i've got is this triangle here is going to wrap this point right here is going to wrap all the way around and then curve up to that point leaving a flat spot on the side here so it can continue all the way back into the neck pocket and then all i need to do is i need to find a similar shape that i can use right so we have a triangle here we've got one two and a curve well if we imagine that we've got a curve here we can have a triangle connecting between here and here and have the same shape with the same amount of points so that's going to be great so let's go ahead and hit finish and let's sketch i had something selected move that around let's sketch on this surface again this time what i want to do is i want to project in that curve and i want to connect here to here and i want to project in this line so that will take care of that clip right because it's going to actually connect to that side wall make that horizontal okay and now we've got that looks like let's see let's draw a line here to here actually let's do that on the first sketch and see what happens or not the first sketch the second one actually no i do need to do it on that last one so let's draw a line i know i've projected this in but i want this line to terminate at this sketch so i'm drawing in a manual line there so i've got a rail here i've got a rail in the middle and i've got a rail on the side that loops up so you can see let me hide the body and i'll show you what's happening let's hide the fretboard sketch for now so you've got this triangle shape it's going to follow these lines and these two are going to stop here this one's going to keep going all the way around so if i loft let's go create loft from here to here let's show our body again right it's going gonna do its automatic version first and let's choose our rail we want this rail we want this rail and we want this rail right so what it's doing again is this triangle with a curve is sweeping up and the top is stopping here and the bottom is sweeping up if i hit okay you've got a near perfect transition now it's not going to be perfect here because there's still meat that it's connected to but it is perfect at this area right here and you can add a fillet here if you want to even smooth that out more but i can't tell you how long it took me to figure that out i i worked on that neck transition trying a hundred different ways to do precisely that and it was deceptively simple like it was staring me it was staring me in the eye but i couldn't see it the entire time and i finally figured that out that is one smooth clean face that goes right up i'm extremely happy with that um so as for the other side this again depends on your design so what you can do so depend in my design what i could do is come this arc and then keep the net going up into this into this body right here so i could actually have it sweep in and come like that now what i did in mine because i decided to leave a step there is let me pull up that loft i'll show you so this one's a little interesting because i did it a little bit differently so i only had two points but in this case this is one of the few cases where i don't need an equal number of points because i had my surface here and then i had this line connecting to that dot and this line connecting to that same dot so it all curved to a single point so this shape swept up and then started rotating in and then it all merged to a single point and you can do that and that actually worked really well for me and so that's how i cut out that shape but let me show you how you could potentially do something else so let's try this here let's say you wanted to have that clean sweep from here all the way in i'm not going to go all the way through it because it's going to take me a significant amount of time but i can show you the basic principles and hopefully by now the rest will start to make sense so i again i prefer to do lofted cuts when it comes to this rather than extrudes now you can do extrudes but when you try to do those first and then cut afterwards it can be annoying so what i'm going to do is i need to extrude this up so i have something to cut from right because that's going to taper up so let's go ahead and sketch on this face let's project in that surface actually undo let's project in the lines instead project like that now i have a surface that i can extrude so let's go up to this object obviously this looks terrible right now but what that's going to do is it's going to give us some meat to cut from and make sure that we're our transition is smooth so what i can do is i can sketch on this surface now if i were to actually do this on this particular guitar i'd have to create some kind of plane between here and somewhere out here right so i could maybe even bring in these sketches and create a plane between undo hold on sorry i could potentially create a plane between this point this point and that point right so that way i could have something that's outside that surface otherwise we're going to run into that clipping issue again but for the sake of time this video is already getting pretty long let me show you a quick example so if i draw on this surface and then i project in this line and this line let's create an arc let's say from here to here right and let's project in this line make these two tangent and then connect the dots up here let's see oh that needs to be horizontal okay so that's constrained so what's not is the distance here so let's give that a distance of let's say one inch and then this is not constrained for some reason that's fine figure that out in a little bit but so i've got my first one there that's going to cut through so if i took that shape and i cut through let's just pretend for a second you can see that this has a perfect transition from here up to here so the question is how do we wrap that around right so again just for example sake if i sketch on this surface i've already got a similar structure right here so project that in and let's do this do an arc from here to here project that in so we can make that tangent to there like that and let's make that two inches right hit okay so now we're gonna loft from here to there and you could theoretically if you did this right the right way you could law from here to here here to here here to here and all the way around to and getting smaller as you go around so now let's create our third rail so let's go project in that sketch line draw that out and create an arc between here and here we need to project that in that create an arc like that now let's make these two tangent and i need to make this tangent somehow so let's create ourself a triangle and we'll make those construction lines just make those horizontal real quick i accidentally drew a second line there we go okay so those are defined so now that now the question is where does this line go or what's this radius right so let's give that like a let's see if we can do one and a half inch radius actually it's that's awful so let's do a three inch radius that looks much better in fact we can even go a little larger so if that were to say go all the way around here you can see how you could draw that line so this should give you enough of an example so let's hit finish it looks like we've got one rail we've got two rails and now we've got three rails so let's take this all right that body let's go create loft hide that body we want a lot from here to here show the body again invalid direction let's see if it hap if it changes when i add the rails there there yep okay and then we want this rail and that rail okay that's throwing an error let me see if i you know i bet that has to do with that line that i didn't constrain very well let's go here go back and fix that let's delete that just draw one line out pardon me here sorry this is what happens when you're dealing with lofts they can be really annoying sometimes and let's actually project this line from way back here so that way we've got a nice straight line because remember it only projects in what's visible from this plane and let's see if we make that tangent there we go now we've got a fully defined line i think it just didn't like how it was interacting with this curve let's hit that we lost one of our sketch points from there let's fix that real quick just a second delete that there we go okay project that line in make sure that's coincident make sure that's horizontal there we go okay that's fixed and let's make sure that line is good too let's try the loft here real quick bodies all right let's go create loft hide the bodies all right that's still throwing me errors let's see what happens i did this just a second ago before i take this video and now it's not working of course um maybe maybe i can you can still see i apologize for the right not working but basically what it would do is it would cut that shape out right there and you could wrap that all the way around there but yeah let's undo that one well like i said in previous videos lofting can be infuriating sometimes and if you're not really careful with how you prepare your sketches and your lines you can run into issues like that i was clearly trying to rush through to give you guys an example and i messed up somewhere offline i spent about an hour trying to figure out where i messed that up and couldn't couldn't replicate it so i apologize for not being able to show you that example right now i will probably show you some of that when it comes to the headstock and if not and you guys still have questions about that i will make a dedicated video later on how to do that and make sure i do it properly so let me go ahead and show you my solution for my guitar and i think that's going to be fairly common for a lot of people um in fact i think this right here is going to cover most people's basis on it when they're designing guitars but let me show you that little cusp that i did right there so let me open up that original sketch of the neck profile and what i want to do is create an arc from here to here and then an arc from here to there and i want those two to be tangent okay that looks pretty good right about there so what is that 0.25 and 2.5 nope that needs to be midpoint to there okay there we go so now i've got that and i've got my rails already because this body or this line right here can act as a rail and so can this one so let's take this shape right here create loft add a rail let's not do chain selection from here to there and there cut nope i messed up again because i'm trying to rush through this so let me sketch on this project in these lines i'm going to draw i'm just going to project in this one and i'm going to draw from this point to this point make sure i'm diligent about connecting all my dots and let's do that instead so create loft that rail and that rail oh we need to select our second profile which is that point there we go now we do our rail from here here to here you can see it's trying to warp itself and then from here to here and hit okay for me it was that simple i mean granted it took me forever to get there um let me hide my sketches so you can see it more clearly so i've got a clean transition from here up and i've got a clean transition with a little bit of a you know relief for the finger so it has something to grab onto and then what i can do when we contour the back of the body or yeah the back side the relief cut right here i can draw a triangle from here making it tangent to that right there and sweep that all around this entire thing and get a really nice contour so i apologize again for messing that up but such is life with lofting and this video is dragging on too long so i hope that what i've been able to show you has given you some really good insights as to how to approach uh the neck transition and i'm sure many of you will have many questions about your particular models and i'll do my best to answer as many of them as possible but thank you for coming and in the next series what i'm going to do is we're going to work on the neck the rest of the neck and the headstock so look forward to that and we're going to finish up this back cavity right here or the relief cut we're going to get that done and we're going to work on the neck and the headstock so again thank you for coming and i appreciate y'all and i'll see you next time

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 2,611

Keywords: CAD, CNC, Design, Fusion 360, Guitar, Luthier, autodesk fusion 360, computer aided design, engineering, industrial design, product design

Id: ezjKU7-Uy8E

Length: 59min 4sec (3544 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021