Guitars in Fusion 360 | Part 5 - Fretboard, Nut, and Bridge

hello everyone my name is austin shainer and welcome back to my channel we reached episode 5 of how to build a guitar in fusion 360. now in the last episode we went over what i deemed the infamous headstock transition we went over why it's the most complicated part of the guitar to model and what strategies you could use to make it work for your design whether that be fillets lofting patching etc now we're actually almost done with the guitar most of the hard work is pretty much done so we've got the main portion of the body we've got the neck we've got the headstock we've got our laminated top and there's not that much more to do except for the nitty gritty details so today what i'd like to do is get the truss rod installed into the truss rod slot the fretboard the fret wire the nut and the bridge in place and that should give us enough information so that we can place know where to place the tuners where to place the pickups and the pickup slots and our electronics cavity and knobs etc in the final episode so this is going to be the second to last episode of this series and i appreciate you guys joining me along the way but let's get to it okay so first things first we want to get the truss rod slot cut into the neck so let's hide our laminated top and let's talk about the truss rod so there's a couple different types of truss rods that you can put into a neck there's what i'm going to be using is a spoke wheel style where there's a spoke at the end or the heel end of the neck rather than the type that protrudes outside of the headstock now the reason i chose to go that route other than looks and accessibility which i i generally prefer the spoke wheel style anyway but because i like to place my veloute a little bit further back that ended up making this section of the neck a little bit narrower than i would have liked and so i don't want to cut into that neck any more than i already have and to prevent any disaster down the road so what i actually would like to do is cut a spoke wheel style which means it's going to be from like here on the neck all the way to the heel so what's really nice is on stu mac's website the spoke nut hot rod truss rod that's quite the name they had the dimensions right here and that was enough information for me to go ahead and model my own took a little bit to extrapolate some of the dimensions out of there but i was able to go ahead and model a truss rod and i'm going to use this for my dimensions to cut into the neck so let's see where we're going to start so we we're going to start from the spoke side up so we've got a half inch diameter spoke connected to a 0.3125 inch diameter shaft connected to this block right here which we'll end up cutting so let's go back and let's start from right here okay so what we need is a midline make that midpoint and we need it to be at least a half an inch but really because you're going to be rotating this and there might be a little slop give yourself a little bit more so let's do 0.625 inches to give ourselves a 16 on each side and then we'll go ahead and just make it a rectangle like that okay now what is the distance from here to the bottom of this actually we can distance it from the top so we've got .0729 inches from the top of this surface to the top of the spoke 0.0729 so let's give ourselves a circle make a construction make it half an inch let's make it centered or vertical to the midpoint and let's dimension from this arc 0.0729 inches okay so that needs to be the very bot that needs to be at least where this square needs to go down to and since we went ahead and gave this let's do that make that vertical give ourselves another line down here make that vertical that way we keep the distance equal on all sides we do is just make these two equal actually i guess i didn't even need that so there we go so that's the channel we need to cut out so how far do we need to cut it out so we need to cut at least the thickness of this which is 3 16 of an inch or 0.1875 i'm going to give myself a little bit more breathing room than that so let's go ahead and cut it back a quarter of an inch negative 0.25 inches okay so that's where the spoke is going to sit now we need to cut room for the shaft so let's see we've got 0.3125 inches and what's the distance from there to there actually we can just do it on center so let's sketch on this surface pull up the last sketch that we just did hold on there we go okay let's project this circle in and then what we can do is make that a construction line and add a circle there 0.3125 inches actually i'm going to undo that instead of bringing in the circle let's just bring in the center point circle 0.3125 inches okay make that a construction line and let's do the same thing so let's go rectangle here midpoint okay and then let's make here to here which i don't want that at the midpoint let's do it from here to here okay so we want to give ourselves let's say a 32nd of an inch we don't need that much clearance here so zero three one two five and now let's do the same thing here make those horizontal and make these equal there we go so now we have our width so that we have a 30 second clearance on all sides and we need to cut that back how far so from here to here 0.625 inches okay so cut that back negative 0.625 inches okay so now we've got that all that's left to do is to cut from this surface back to here just 17.4375 by how wide by 0.2188 so now let's sketch on this surface give ourselves another rectangle project that in make those midpoint go point two one eight eight inches let's double check that real quick one two 0.2188 yep and then by how deep 0.4375 0.4375 inches and how long by 17.4375 negative 17.4375 inches and there we go our truss rod slot is done so let's go ahead and drop that in so grab my truss rod drop that in okay let's rotate it a bit into place 90 degrees okay and then what we can use is we can join this to our sketch so let's pull up our sketch and let's pull up the other sketch okay so i want this circle to be joined to that circle right there that way it's aligned in this direction rather than up against this side of the body hit okay hide our sketches and there we go so you can see that the spoke is going to sit inside this channel it's got enough clearance on all sides i'm not actually worried about this dimension being too tight because what's going to end up happening is as you tighten this it's going to pull the truss rod a little bit towards it because it's captive by this flange here so it's going to pull the truss rod towards it and so this is in theory the longest that the truss rod will ever be it should only get a little bit shorter as it is as it expands okay so now that that's done we can go ahead and work on the fretboard so let's go ahead and create a new component called fretboard and let's sketch on this surface continue come on my computer's freezing up there we go okay so we want to do is bring in this line actually let's bring in this line and go here like that make this coincident to there i guess i actually didn't need that line so let's delete that come up and now the question is what is our radius going to be now this is a highly debated topic in the guitar community what's the perfect fretboard radius it really just depends on your feel what you like to play a quick google search found me this website from talia capos and ortholi i'm not sure how to pronounce that but it gives me the fretboard radius by make and model the average fretboard radius on most of their guitars so you can see as you go down the list most of these companies hover somewhere in the 12 to 14 to 16 inch range for their fretboard radiuses fenders obviously typically have a more acute angle on there so not a cute angle but a tighter radius so some of the vintage fenders are only seven and a quarter and modern ones are nine and a half i've personally played a lot of ibanez and so they use a lot of 12 inch couple 10 inch they have a couple big ones as well i've personally really liked their 12 inch style so that's what i'm going to go with so i'm going to go 12 inch radius that got brought up a little bit okay we need these to be horizontal to each other to help avoid that and then the question is what is the height so it's pretty common for fretboards to end up being around a quarter of an inch tall so with a 12 inch radius and a quarter of an inch tall should be good so that's one side of it now we need to go ahead and sketch the fretboard at the other side so let's go construct plane at angle from here actually let's bring back our fretboard sketch we want to do it from here because the nut is going to be out here so construct plane at angle 90 degrees we'll sketch on that plane and we're gonna do the same thing so let's just project in that line and hide our fretboard sketch now go line up line up create an arc between the two make these two horizontal let's make this dimension to the top of that real quick so 0.25 inches give this a radius of 12 inches now i going to check now that i've got that modeled up i want to see if this height is the same as back there so we got .2133 inches and what is this height 0.2006 so that's actually a little interesting because what ended up happening is we have the same radius but because the neck is tapered this line would kind of be over here on this so this actually ends up being a little taller which means it's going to taper down to the back and i actually don't want that so in this case i'm not going to dimension the height i'm going to keep my radius but this time i'm going to project in this line right there and then we'll make these two equal so that way we have a straight line all the way back but we maintain the same radius okay so we've got that so now all we need to do is loft between the two i need to also update that sketch to not have or make this a construction line there we go okay so now what we can do is we can click here we'll create loft from here to here and let's hide these sketches get those out of the way and let's bring back our fretboard sketch and hide the bodies so we want to use these as rails just to make sure nothing gets a little hinky along the way hit okay bring back our body and hide the sketches okay so there's our fretboard but because it's a new component it's not joined to anything so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna actually bring back that sketch and join the bottom edge of this front to oh come on let me select it there we go to this line right here on the sketch that way now i can't move it so let's hide the sketches bring back our laminated top and let's go ahead and give the fretboard a color just like we did with the laminated top so we can differentiate that from the neck so i'm going to go ahead and give it blue for now and that's already roughed in so we've that quickly got the truss rod installed into the truss rod slot and got the main portion of the fretboard taken care of now what we need to do is cut the slots for the fret wire and then model in the fret wire and that's going to take a little bit of time so bear with me okay so we need to create a plane that we can cut up from so typically if you're making this let's say you're using like a an actual fret saw you would end up cutting down from the top to a certain distance what i prefer to do so that way things don't get messed up later is to actually create a plane and cut up so let's go create offset plane let's hide our fretboard for a second from here now what we need we need to make this go up by whatever's remaining after the fretboard slot is cut so let's look at the fretboard slots on stumax website so i'm going to be using the wide highest fret wire because this is going to be a scratch build so it gives me the most opportunity for fret dressing and getting everything down while still having enough metal so we can see that the tang is .074 inches so we need to come down from this corner 0.074 and so let's see what is our height here we've got 0.2006 so we need to do 0.2006 minus 0.0074 or point zero seven four so point two zero zero six minus point zero seven four i'm going to check that real quick just to be sure uh let's go back where are we there we go point zero seven four yep okay so let's create our plane from here up one two six six one two six six yep okay so that should in theory give us a distance from here to here point zero seven four yep so we nailed that okay so let's sketch here let's go ahead and hide our bodies eliminate the top hide the fretboard hide the truss rod let's bring in the sketch so now what we need to do is project in every one of our frets from our original fretboard sketch so let's bring these in so i probably could have just highlighted these all at once but it doesn't take too long select them all that one i need to select the whole row so double click hit p for project bring those in bring our fretboard back in and now we can hide that sketch so this is what we're going to be sketching on so we do a midpoint rectangle back rectangle or center center rectangle that select the midpoint select this hit a midpoint constraint so that way it centers it now according to stu mac's website our fret wire is sized to fit a point zero two three inch fret slot width so we need to go back and make this point zero two three inches now that made it too short so bring it up and let's make it stick out a bit further from the fretboard so that way we can guarantee that we're going to cut all the way through because remember there's a taper going down so let's give this a construction line here and dimension that let's say 0.125 inches just go off the fretboard by one two five and since it's a midpoint it applied the same thing to the other side so now all we got to do is basically do that for the rest of these but in this case we can just make this one equal and make these two equal like that and it's done so you're just going to do that to every single one and then i'll be back in a minute might do a time lapse here okay so thanks for bearing with me on that so we've got all of these fully constrained it's going to bring back our fretboard body and let's do a cut extrude select all of these it's also quite tedious but you can see why we extended off so that way it doesn't end up cutting into the actual or cutting short of the edge of the neck or not the neck the fretboard so let's do that keep going every time i got to select 24 it's quite annoying okay almost there one more okay now we want to cut up through all hit okay take a second to load now let's go ahead and bring back our body so we can see how this all looks okay so now not only do we have our truss rod slot and our truss rod installed we've also got our fretboard with our fret wire or not our front wire but our fret wire slots in place so now what we need to do is go ahead and model the fret wire this is going to be probably the most annoying or tedious part for everybody but there's really probably two ways to do this i'm going to show you the method that i use but you can certainly do it any method that works for you so go ahead and sketch on the side of the fretboard we're not going to create a horizontal plane we're going to sketch on the side of the fretboard and what we need to do is we need to model one of the profiles of the frets so if we go back to our website what we see here let me zoom in for you guys we've got the crown width is point one one zero the crown height is point zero five three and the tank's point zero seven four so what we need is a shape that looks like this so we need an arc make these two horizontal we need a line coming in a line down line coming over line up and a line connecting make these two those are going to already be horizontal let's give ourselves a midpoint construction line so that way it's easy to dimension from the height make that vertical do one down to here okay now what we need is we need a what was that 0.110 on the width here 0.110 inches that and we need a we know that the width is going to match the sorry i went to the review section 0.023 so 0.023 inches and the height is 0.074 okay now we didn't give ourselves the height of the crown so that's point zero five three zero five three inches okay so that should be basically fully defined it just doesn't know where to put it in space yet so all we have to do now is come here select this line at the bottom and hit midpoint and as you can see everything is lined up and we're good so i'm going to show you how to do one so that way it'll make sense what i'm doing during the time lapse in a moment so what we can do is we can go instead of extrude we can go create sweep we're going to sweep this profile up this path now you can see it's trying to create it for us but we don't actually want to cut we want to extrude it so let's go ahead and actually hit new body actually let's make this new component now i learned from doing this already that this one works fine as parallel but as you actually get down the taper where it needs to be parallel ends up cutting or actually ends up raising up part of the fret off of the fretboard up up at this end so what we're going to do is we're going to do perpendicular now what that does is it keeps the if you imagine as this rotate since this is at well this isn't at an angle but since this is vertical as it rotates over when it hits this point it's actually going to be angled inwards so rather than adjusting and making it flat we're going to make this perpendicular for now and that'll all make sense why i did that in a moment so if i hit okay that's how you do one fret now all we have to do is come back into this sketch before we added the fret highlight all your lines ctrl c for copy ctrl v for paste then you can just paste that over and it keeps all of our constraints all of our dimensions make that midpoint hit finish and you can go back to your sweep and then you can add this profile to the same thing and all i'm going to do is i'm just going to copy and paste all of those frets down the row go back to my sweep and add them all in and i'll be back with you guys in a second okay so that's all added back in it's going to hit finish sketch now obviously the proper way to do that i'm trying to skip some time but the proper way to do that would be draw each one and give some constraints to all those lines so that way they're equal to each other so you only have one set of dimensions that you can go back and edit later if you want to change to let's say the jumbo frets or the the narrow frets i did it that way to save myself time because i already knew this is the frets that i wanted to use if you're still trying to figure that out i would end up drawing those in adding some equal constraints and only having one set of dimensions that you need to edit so let's go back to our sweep and let's add in more profiles so here we go keep going there there there there this is one of the most tedious portions of the design because there's just so many of them okay so now let me show you why i chose perpendicular so as you can see the frets are going to extend off of the fretboard that's what we want if i were to choose parallel what ends up happening is it actually raises it above the fretboard and that's not what we want because well obviously that's not what we want but if we choose perpendicular it does look like it just starts to clip into it just a little bit but actually it's not too bad it's just barely underneath and that's fine these frets don't have really any major impact on our design they're most of visual aspects so that we can see what's going on and maybe do some nice renders etc but it actually does help us a little bit in setting the action height of our of our nut or sorry setting the night of our the knight the height of our nuts that way we can set our action words are hard so go and hit okay let that compute okay so just like when we're actually installing real frets our frets ended up extending off and now we need to clip them off so let's go ahead and go back to that construction plane that we created right here let's sketch on that let's bring back our fretboard sketch project these two lines in and then all i want to do is come up from here let's go up a little bit that connect those vertical it's already vertical and let's go up only one to five inches let's make sure that it's clipping all of them yep grab that sketch that we just drew extrude up with a cut like that hit okay let's hide our sketches now i did something wrong as you can see because i went from the bottom of that so i'm actually going to extrude or cut in two different directions so let's go back to that go two sides so we're gonna go up all so side one let's do all and then side two i'm gonna go down let's go down one two five inches yep so that'll just take us back to the bottom of the fretboard roughly so hit okay and there you go so now we've got the flush fret wire at the end on every one of these on both sides so tedious but that's the fastest way i've been able to do that and since these are mostly mostly a visual aspect of the guitar in the fusion 360 space i don't really care that these corners right here are just a little clipped off because we used perpendicular not flush but if you were really concerned about it then you'd have to model and sweep each one individually and it just sounds like way too much work so i'm totally fine with that okay so let's go ahead and get the nut in place i realize we're kind of powering through a lot today i need to get a lot of this done so that way i can finish it finish this in the next episode because the baby's going to be here in july and i'm not going to have much time after that to work on this so let me go ahead and create a new component call it nut now there's a couple different ways you can approach the nut i'm going to go ahead and use the captive version so what i mean by that is i'm not actually going to recess a slot for the nut in place i'm just going to put a dab of super glue and let the pressure of this or the tension of the strings hold it in place but you could absolutely cut a slot from here down and let me show you how you would do that so open up our sketch here from our fretboard and then we could just cut that down so cut we cut that down whatever dimension we need and then extrude a nut up from there but what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go ahead and extrude up now i'm going to extrude up an arbitrary amount so 0.5 inches and then what we're going to do is we're going to cut cut that away cut the radius away so let's sketch on this surface and there's a good reason for that because remember this is still tapering in so if i sketched on this surface and cut back then i'd end up clipping off just a little sliver of material here so we want to sketch on this surface then we can take the radius of the profile or the sorry the radius of the neck at that profile let's go ahead and hide our fretboard so all we want to do is go offset now let's offset it at minimum the height of the frets that's the minimum you would want because you don't want it lower than the fret so that way the string is always touching so if we go back to our frets it's point zero seven four sorry point zero five three so i'm actually going to just do round it up and go point zero sixty five inches so just slightly higher than the frets themselves now we can do is just sketch up like this connect those dots make it vertical vertical and make these two midpoint make that horizontal okay and we can grab that sketch cut it through to the back side of the nut and now we've got our nut roughed in place so let's bring the fretboard back now you can see that it's actually just slightly higher slightly higher than the top of the crown and that's kind of what we want so i'm not going to in my design i'm not going to actually put in the the string cutouts what you would file in for the strings i don't really care because i'm going to be hand making that anyway i'm not going to be making that on the cnc this just gives me a rough dimensions of what i need to actually cut and that should do it so moving on let me hide the sketches now that we've got the nut the fretboard the fret wire the truss rod and the truss rod slot actually let me apply a quick appearance to that so let's go paint let's make that red why not okay so now we can differentiate it now again we will be applying proper appearances to this later so now the last thing we're going to do is we're going to put in the bridge and then we can go and call this video a wrap so let's bring back our sketch now the hip shot bridge i'm going to be using a six string fixed guitar bridge now let's make sure we got the right one so according to hip shop's website hip shots website we have a 0.125 inch floor height is designed for action on guitars with non-angled or low profile necks which is what we have they also have a 0.175 floor height version which is kind of for more gibson style where you've got an angled or raised neck or bridge pockets etc if you wanted to recess it down so since i'm not doing either of those i need to make sure that the model i have is .125 inch floor height so if you go to grabcad.com and you just search hip shot this guy named alex d made an excellent model of a hit shot of a hip shop bridge so i just went ahead i already have an account if you don't have an account create an account and then you can just download that and import it into your model so let me bring that up where is my bridge here we are drag that into our model okay let's rotate that 90 degrees yeah that's the right orientation okay hit okay let's see if it separates hold on yep so see some of the pieces here are kind of not joined together so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select oh i dropped that into the nut so let me delete that go back to the main design and re-end re-add it in okay rotate this 90 degrees hit okay so i'm going to select the whole hip shot bridge i'm going to right click and say rigid group what this will do is i don't have to apply any joints or mates all i can do is just say the position all of these things are in just lock them in place so now let's go ahead and get that roughly in place ooh i dragged that right into my model okay let's get this roughly in place okay so now we can use our fretboard sketch to go ahead and join these together so problem is there's a little bit of a radius here so what i need to do is i need to measure from here to here 0.0098 so 9.8 thousandths of an inch so let's go ahead and join this to that so it's going to join a little too high so let's go minus inches okay hit okay for now now i do realize this is elevated so now we need to measure the distance from this surface to this surface 0.125 because that's how much we raised the neck off of the laminated top so let's go back to our joint and let's drag this down 0.125 minus 0.0098 hit okay let's make sure that that's lining up yes that is flush with the bottom of the or the top so now obviously this is in the wrong place because the end of this line is the end of your scale length so that isn't this line right here is in theory where the string should be touching the bridge so let me bring the bridge back or the bridge joint back up or actually i need to measure the distance between here and here so it's 0.2227 inches so i'm going to copy that join come back in 0.2227 inches so that should bring this on top and align roughly align the strings with the center of each of these now it's not perfect because of the string spacing that i gave it in fret finder 2d but it's really close it's only a couple foul off so i'm i'm perfectly fine with that now the reason i aligned it this way is because this one is the furthest one forward now typically when you're setting the intonation of your guitar what you'll do is you'll set it as far forward as it can go mount your bridge there and then you can pull back as necessary maybe give yourself a couple threads going forward but typically the high string doesn't need that much but the low strings end up getting pulled back quite a bit so that's typically how i would set the guitar bridge so that pretty much covers it for today we actually got a lot done in a fairly short amount of time we ended up getting the truss rod and the truss rod slot in place we got the fretboard along with the fret wire me hide the sketches there we go fretboard with the fret wire we got the nut roughed in and we got the bridge set so i'm pretty happy with that all that's really left to do is because we did all of this we set ourselves up so that way we now have enough information on where to place the pickups and the pickup slots we now know where the strings are going to be going through the body so we know where we can place our control cavity where we can place our knobs and everything and where we can place our tuners so the very next episode i'm going to go ahead and cover all of that and we're going to try to wrap up this series i may at some point in the future when i actually start working on this guitar or start building it in real life i may go over the cam side of this but for now because the baby's on the way that's going to be the next episode's going to be the last episode so thank you for joining me today we got a lot done and i'll see you in the next couple weeks

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 1,130

Keywords: Fusion 360, Guitar, Luthier, CNC, CAD, Design, Engineering, Lofting, Patch Tool, Hipshot, Stewmac, Truss Rod

Id: DlZ8UdS5IP0

Length: 42min 51sec (2571 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021