Guitars in Fusion 360 | Part 6 - Final Touches - Pickups, Knobs, and Tuners

hello everyone my name is austin shainer and welcome back to my channel we've finally reached the last episode of how to build a guitar in fusion 360. for those of you who followed the series from the beginning first of all thank you so much for the support and time that you invested into this and secondly congratulations because i do realize that my videos can be quite long and they can be quite tedious to get through so everybody who took the time to watch it and learn i really appreciate it so what have we covered so far in episode 1 we covered the foundational sketches and why it's important to lay a good foundation for your design in episode 2 we did our first extrusions and then kind of detoured and covered the basics of lofting so that we'd be more prepared for the more difficult contours down the road in episode three we actually contoured the body and the neck transition in episode 4 we went through the different kinds of strategies you can use to get good results on a headstock transition in episode 5 we powered through the truss rod fretboard nut and bridge and finally in this episode we're ready to start buttoning up this guitar with hardware such as pickups output jacks control cavities knobs tuners etc so that's a lot to do and that's a lot to get through so let's not waste any more time let's get this started okay so just like in episode one where we laid out some foundational sketches let's go ahead and do the same thing but for all of our hardware and controls so that way we only have really one major sketch and so we're not creating you know 30 new sketches in this design so let's go ahead and sketch on the top surface and let's lay out our tuners first so if i hide my body actually i need that projecting these two lines at and i'm going to offset these by 0.375 inches it might need to go a little bit further than that but that's okay i can always go back and update it offset by 0.375 inches that's going to be our center line that our shaft is going to ride on so let's go ahead and give ourselves some holes make that coincident okay we need to make all these equal and let's look at our tuner real quick and see what the outer dimension is of this shaft which is 10 millimeter but actually what we're really concerned about is this one we need both but so the outer diameter that is 15.5 millimeters so what i'm actually going to do is create two circles on one of them that'll help us figure out if the 3.375 is right so 15.5 millimeters and then we've got 10 millimeters so see we're good so it's not breaching outside of the outside of the headstock so i'm just going to make that a construction line and then what we need to do is dimension from here let's bring our body back to here 0.75 inches so that's our first one i made these coincident with the bottom i did not even notice that so circle circle circle make these all equal to this one make this one vertical to here this one vertical to this one and this one vertical to this one okay so now they're riding up that chain and they're staying vertical to each other so bring the body back and let's go 0.75 from our smallest and then let's make this a midpoint between those two so let's go ahead and draw a line here and a line here make these construction and make them equal so that guarantees that it's going to be the midpoint between all of those so imagine we could just take those even though it's sitting on a plane a little bit higher than the actual surface we can cut all the way through it so that's the sketch for our tuners and now let's work on the bridge sorry i didn't mean bridge i meant the pickups so if we go to emg's website on their website they've got the cutout dimensions that you would need and they also have the dimensions of the faceplates and on the actual instructions for the pickups they've got the dimensions of the pickups itself now i went ahead and grabbed a model from grab cad that's pretty accurate close enough for what i'm doing anyway but mostly what we're going to be doing is drawing a sketch based off of what we see here so let's go ahead and go back and let's make a rectangle and another rectangle and let's dimension it let's bring in this right here to give ourself a dimension off of the fretboard of let's say 0.25 inches actually i'm going to make that a little bit bigger 0.5 inches and then let's actually i'm going to delete this one i'm going to delete both and make them a midpoint rectangle like that dimension off of here 0.5 again we can always come back and update this and what do we need that to be we need that to be 1.6 and we need the length to be 3.37 okay and we want to make sure this is a midpoint so we can create a real quick construction line to the midpoint of our fretboard make that horizontal okay so that one is locked in and then we need the actually it was 3.37 to the outside of the long one so i need to get rid of that 3.37 inches and this one is going to be shorter so 2.84 like that and what's the width of this 0.9 so this one's going to be 0.9 okay so there's our first sketch so let's go ahead and highlight all of that copy paste bring that over for a bridge pickup it kept all of our dimensions and relations all we need to do is dimension between them make that horizontal and let's give the center point dimension of three inches now of course i can always go back and update that but that should work for now okay so those two are done now let's figure out where we're going to place the knobs so let's go here and here and we need to look at our potentiometer to figure out what that hole size is going to be so let me go over to the potentiometer i'm going to be using let's see the depth six millimeter basically quarter of an inch which is good that's the size of our laminated top and the diameter is nine millimeter so let's come over here make that nine millimeter make these equal okay now let's also give ourselves a construction circle so that way we can see the general size of the knob so here's the knob that i've pulled off of grab cad which is going to be similar to what i want so i want to see the diameter gonna be kind of hard to measure off of this but it looks like there's a point that's straight vertical yep 19 millimeters okay so let's come back and dimension this as 19 millimeters undo there we go 19 millimeters and make these two equal okay now we just need to position them so let's put this one it's projecting this point right here actually projecting that line draw that to there make these collinear okay and then let's give ourselves a construction line here say we want these undo we want these to be one and a half inches apart actually i think we wanted to be greater than that let's make these two okay and then we can kind of figure out the angle so right about there looks pretty good let's make this a little bit less 1.75 that's looking a little better okay and i want that to come in 1.5 yep that's looking pretty good okay and then we still have our angle adjustment here so let's give ourselves an angle 135 it's basically a 45 degree angle if you were to come this way okay so let's see we've got that let's hide our bodies and see what we're looking at here okay so we've got our headstock sketched our pickup slot sketched and our knobs sketched so that's looking pretty good to me the only thing kind of remaining is the toggle switch sorry took me a second it's getting a little late so let's look at our toggle switch on stumac so this uses a quarter inch mounting hole so we need a quarter of an inch hole 0.25 inches now where are we going to place that so i could place it back here or i could place it up here kind of like a gibson so let me think for a second yeah so i think i want to place it over here so i'm just giving myself another construction line between here and here let's go and make these perpendicular and let's make this come out about the same distance 1.5 that's looking pretty good okay so i'll have my volume knob and my tone knob and my selector switch that's looking pretty good now what i'm going to be doing for the jack is i'm going to be using an n pin jack kind of like what you see on acoustic guitars where your strap actually connects to it so if i bring back my body that's going to be going through this wall right here tangent straight into the body so that way we can have our pickup or not our pickup our control cavity kind of come down like that and not have to sweep all the way across into the pickup area we're going to end up cutting some channels from the pickup area to route our cables through to there so that's looking pretty good to me so let's go ahead and cut so let's grab our tuner holes and cut through to the back of the headstock oop i didn't select this one undo there we go two object back of the headstock done and let's bring back that sketch actually we still have it up okay now we need to cut the pickup slots actually before we do that let's go ahead and grab these ones since these are pretty easy cut through and let's hide our main body and i'm only going to be cutting these through to the laminated top because i'm going to have a cavity in the back that will come all the way through to the laminated top so that's the amount that it's going to be holding onto that's a quarter of an inch which is the amount of thread available on those as well so that works out nicely so let's cut that through okay and then the last thing is we need to cut the pickup slots through both so let's select these now when you cut these down you've kind of got a couple different options so if you're going to be hard mounting your pickups you 0.75 seems to be about the right amount to bring it down um but when you're hard mounting it you kind of need to figure that out ahead of time because you won't really be able to adjust the pickup very well unless you put on put in some kind of like sponge padding or something underneath to kind of act as a spring so if you're going to be hard mounting make sure you kind of know what the distance you want from the top of your bridge to your strings is going to be and then go from there if you're going to be using the mounting plate for the brit or not for the bridge for the pickups then 0.75 seems to work pretty well now they do recommend on many websites that you actually cut an extended slot down for these for like the mounting feet on the pickups i don't find that particularly necessary because at least with humbuckers because active pickups tend to want to sit closer to the strings than passive pickups and so you're actually going to end up with probably quite a bit of breathing room even if you mount it at .75 but if you're really concerned about it then you can go ahead and extend that down if you feel like you want to have more room to pull that down so i'm going to say negative 0.75 inches and call that good and then let's go ahead and apply a fill it let me see what size that fillet is supposed to be so according to emg's website so the fill it should be 0.18 on all inside radii so inside corners inside corners take me a second to select all these okay 0.187 did i get that right i missed this one right here okay that's looking pretty good let's grab the other ones while we're at it keep going trying to do this quick this is tedious parts of cad modeling and i still miss that top one somehow okay so i got all that hit okay and we're good so that part's already done so we've got the tuner holes we've got the pickup slots and we've got the preliminary holes for our potentiometers and our selector switch now one cool thing about having a laminated top now this won't apply to people who have a unibody style but cool thing about having a laminated top is that you can actually hide channels behind it that you can pre-route before you glue on the top which is really cool because then you don't have to take like a long drill bit and drill through each pickup slot or into the cavity so you can just pre-route those and then cover it up so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back to our last sketch and i'm going to make a connecting slot between these so let's go from here to here make that midpoint make that midpoint and let's make this 0.5 inches okay and now i'm going to go back to that extrude where we pulled that in and i'm going to highlight that so let me show my sketches grab that as well oop i actually don't want to do that so i need to hide my laminated top then show the sketch and do a separate cut down to the same distance so to object the bottom of that surface hit okay hide the sketch so you can see i've got a slot connecting these two and then all i can do is just bring back my laminated top and cover it up so i've got my pre-built wiring holes which is great and i'm going to do the same thing to connect it to the control cavity in a moment okay so now we've got enough information to go ahead and cut our control cavity so let's sketch on the back surface and we want to hide our other sketches this one for now and let's bring in this surface and let's bring in these holes to that sketch and let's bring in the bottom surface of the bridge so let's hide the limited top see if we can gras snag that bottom surface of the bridge and project that in so that way we can kind of see where everything is meant to be connected and we can avoid certain areas so let's go ahead and what i'm going to do is i'm going to take these lines right here project those into my sketch and now i'm going to hide my body and i'm going to take these and i'm going to offset them a little bit so let's go 0.125 that's the wrong direction negative point one two five and let's give a little bit more negative point two five inches okay so now because i did that if i bring back my body you can see i've got a little bit of breathing room where the actual cover plate can sit so i want to go ahead and i'm going to make this one a construction line go create arc from here to here let's make that tangent and now i can draw a straight line down make these tangent and i'm going to go ahead and make these let's distance this off of the bridge give ourselves a little bit of breathing room here let's go 0.25 like that bring this down and i'm going to create an arc here that is going to be concentric with the bridge so concentric like that okay so that keeps my 0.25 around the corner of the bridge now i'm going to create a straight line over let's make that oh before we dimension that let's give ourselves an arc to this line here make that tangent okay and then let's make it vertical to the front edge of the bridge no we need to we need to make these tangent there we go okay so the only thing remaining is to get this arc tangent now this might be a little tricky actually but let's see what we can do come on work with me here okay can we make those tangent we cannot so what i'm going to do is i'm going to draw a straight line out make that tangent to that line i'm going to make that a construction line and then maybe we can make this tangent to that circle come on there we go so that's not wanting me to make that tangent either and i'm not sure why to be honest let's see okay well what i can do is just connect it to here and it'll get me pretty damn close connect those two and let's see i should still be able to move something it looks like no i can't move that i can't move that should be able to move this maybe i just give that a dimension nope there we go okay so it's liking that so let's give this a radius of 0.75 so let's just go ahead and delete that line 0.75 okay that's going to get me pretty dang close i'm all right with that so arc from here to here to close up this sketch make those tangent that seems to be working but it's not defining it these sketches are not playing very nice today why is that okay let's try this again great arc actually you know what i can just turn that off as a construction line and it'll close the profile so that'll end up being my back plate now the end pin will come in through the side here right here that'll leave me room for the other hardware and the or not hardware the other electronics and the battery up here and that should be good and then i can end up creating a channel that cuts into this one right here so let's go ahead and do that real quick as well so let's draw let's see how do we want to do this let's look at it from the front because we can see it a little bit better so we want a channel like this one right here to come into here and we don't it's going to be hidden behind the laminated top so it doesn't matter if it clips off this corner at all so yeah let's go ahead and do that let's just clip off that corner so let's go ahead and draw it from here to here here to here let's make these parallel to each other i got an extra arc somehow coincident make these parallel okay and now it's just going to want kind of an angle so let's see that's probably fine the way it is to be honest but actually what i want to do the more i'm looking at this is i want to go ahead and move this one to here and let's see let's do that so let's see if we can give a radian or not a radius yeah 135 so it's basically a 45 degree angle that should work for me so now what i want to do is i want to cut this up to the laminated top actually i need to do one more step i apologize i need to offset this whole shape right here maybe minus this arc offset see if we can offset that no it won't let me offset of an offset so that's the problem so let me grab these ones offset and we need to give ourselves a lip so that the back plate has something to rest onto so let's go negative 0.5 give ourselves a quarter inch lip on all sides and we're going to replicate that shape real quick so there down to here create an arc around the corner okay let's stop real quick and give it some constraints so it doesn't go haywire on us concentric hold on make these tangent to each other that's weird okay sorry for all the goof ups tonight the my computer's or fusion's acting a little strange on me so make these tangents yes okay that's what that's what i was wanting tangent to here okay these two need to be concentric that then we want these two to be vertical nope that went horizontal i need to bring it over a little bit okay can we make those vertical yes okay so keep going around the circle go create arc from here to here now i think i won't think i have to dimension it this time i think i can just literally make this concentric concentric maybe not okay let's make these vertical as this model's getting bigger and bigger it's having a harder time keeping up with all the constraints that's part of the problem okay see if we can make this concentric yeah there we go okay cool so now we can cut this inner shape plus we need to actually connect this line in this line because we need this channel to go all the way through actually we don't want that channel to go all the way through the more i think about it okay so let's cut this up to the laminated top so bring back the laminated top hide the body like that up to object laminated top bring back the body so that it's a cut hit okay nope i didn't select those circles so let's bring back our sketch we want to cut those as well okay now we are missing some reference in here and there that got messed up somehow so let's redo that saying it's over defined like that maybe that's because it's concentric no that should work those are vertical you know maybe no that's going to stay horizontal because it's concentric like that maybe i can define the distance between these two there we go 0.25 okay sometimes fusion really throws fits at weird dimensions hit okay did that fix it yes that fixed it so i no longer have an error on that sketch okay so what we also need to do is cut that channel so but we need that channel to actually be on the same side as this not where i drew it and i think that's where i was getting screwed up so i don't think we actually need this at all right here we need that on the front side by the original sketch so let's go ahead and sketch on the laminated top or not on the laminated top on this portion and let's connect the top of this arc i need to project that in project and come on project and you're projecting this arc so we're going from this point to this point and then from this point to somewhere on this circle that is parallel to this line there we go okay and then we should oh i need to project these in to close the sketch there we go so we're going to cut that down to the bottom surface of the pickup slot hit okay there we go okay so not only do we have the pickup slot we've got the channel connecting the two and we have a channel running it to the cavity so if i bring back the laminated top you won't see any of that but you will have the cavity right here and you can see that you've got that hidden wiring channel right there so now i need to bring back that sketch not that one this one and we want to cut this down by the thickness of our control cavity so i'm going to cut that down another quarter of an inch so minus 0.25 hide the sketches and now we have a panel or now we have a recess for the panel that we can put on there so let's go ahead and make that panel so let's create a new component control panel okay let's bring back that sketch and inside control panel we want to take this sketch and this sketch with all the circles bring that down negative 0.25 inches now we should be able to move that in theory unless i accidentally made it part of nope okay there we go so right here i want to join that to this there we go hit okay okay so now we've got our control cavity not too bad so the last thing i need to do before we can start installing all the hardware and finish up the guitar is to cut two holes for end pins so that way we can actually have straps on the guitar i am like i said before i am going to be using an n pin jack rather than like a fender style where it comes out the side here that just seemed to be the easiest thing for me to do in my design so let's go ahead and do that so i need to place my end pin somewhere within this control cavity tangent to this surface so i'm going to go construct tangent plane right here and that's going to go ahead and give me a plane that's both tangent to that corner and right here so let's hit ok sketch on that plane reorient and let's project in this wall right here and what i want to do is i want to find the midpoint not of these lines but between here so let's grab these two lines make them equal and let's make the center point vertical to the tangent point of this circle which is right there and most end pins are around a half inch i think the one that i was going to be using was around 12 millimeter so i'm going to say half inch that gives me a little bit of clearance so 0.5 inches and i can make these construction lines and let's cut that into the cavity so we're cutting that we're still in the control panel so i need to back out of that i need to come back into here i need to redraw that sketch i apologize i'm still in that this component so let's go back to the body create tangent plane here hit okay sketch right there reorient again give ourselves our project that in and give ourselves our two construction lines make them equal and make this vertical to the tangent point give ourselves a half inch circle which actually happens to be the distance here but just in case i ever decide to change the thickness here i'm going to go ahead and just give it a dimension of half an inch so 0.5 inches okay so now we can cut that there we go into the control cavity so let's hide the panel and we want to go up to this object right there so that's where my end pin is going to be coming in at okay so there we go so now we have enough to go ahead and start installing all of the hardware and apply some appearances and tidy up this model let's bring back the actual let's leave the control panel off for now and let's go ahead and install our potentiometers so let's go potentiometer into the design hit okay and let's make that this circle right there to the top right here hit okay you can see that's sitting inside there now obviously when you install it you could reorient those so i could do that right now so it's facing a better direction let's go to 70. okay let's copy that paste it over do the same thing over here so grab this one here join it to not to that dot to right there hit okay and let's reorient that one too so it's pointing a little bit better direction okay now let's grab our knob drag that into the design excuse me come on if the computer ever decides to load there we are okay now i do kind of regret picking a knob that already had knurling on it because that makes my design a lot more complex and makes the overall design slower to calculate but let's grab that point and see if we can join it no we can't do that so can we grab this and make it to here see what happens flip the orientation it should work let's see no it's going into the body a little bit i didn't make it high enough so let's bring that up negative .065 and see if that fixes it there that's looking a little better okay so let's take that same one probably should have done these last but that's okay copy paste hit ok what just happened there okay it's just being slow let's grab this circle again join it to here join probably have to flip the orientation again and raise it up sixteenth of an inch so negative point zero sixty-five inches okay now i need to quickly save this design because i haven't saved it the entire time okay never mind i thought it was going to take a second to load all that so we're good it is weird because as you move the model around those knurling disappears and then it kind of comes back now let's grab our knob drag that into the design excuse me come on if the computer ever decides to load there we are okay now i do kind of regret picking a knob that already had knurling on it because that makes my design a lot more complex and makes the overall design slower to calculate but let's grab that point and see if we can join it no we can't do that so can we grab this and make it to here see what happens flip the orientation it should work let's see nope it's going into the body a little bit i didn't make it high enough so let's bring that up negative .065 and see if that fixes it there that's looking a little better okay so let's take that same one probably should have done these last but that's okay copy paste hit okay what just happened there okay it's just being slow let's grab this circle again join it to here join probably have to flip the orientation again and raise it up sixteenth of an inch so negative point zero sixty five inches okay now i need to quickly save this design because i haven't saved it the entire time okay never mind i thought it was going to take a second to load all that so we're good it is weird because as you move the model around those knurling disappears and then it kind of comes back see there you go okay so now we can install our tuners so i have a couple different styles of tuners in here it's all kind of based off the hip shot design but it's got different um angles for the securing screw so let me drag this one in here hit okay and for the time being i'm going to hide those knobs so that way they don't uh mess up my model now i've got speed back again okay so we want to join the bottom of this shaft to the back of this hole we want to flip it and then we want to make sure it's oriented so do we have the right one first of all yes we do okay because i want them all pointing towards the body so this is just for visual purposes so the angle here doesn't really matter you'll set that when you install it so i'm just going to kind of make it parallel to that edge that looks pretty good okay let me grab the next one might do a time lapse here okay so there we go the tuners are done let's go ahead and install the end pin so i modeled up a brief end pin off some design i found online it's not really critical critical to me how it looks all that matters is that the hole for the diameter is correct so let me bring that in join that to the circle okay i need to find a way to make that concentric yeah there we go perfect okay so there we've got our end pin and now let's install the bridge or not the bridge i keep saying that the pickups so pickups just rotate these into place okay so i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna make this pickup transparent uh where's my opacity controls i need to break the link in order to do that just fine opacity 50 and then what i'm going to do is i'm just going to join this plate to the top surface and then eyeball it only because i didn't give myself the screw holes here but i'm not going to be making those in the cnc so i'm just going to be making them i'm just going to be drilling them by hand when i get to it so let's go ahead and get this close see if we can find a center that should roughly be it okay and let's make this transparent too nope i can't okay that's fine and then we'll paste a new one nope we still had that copied undo let's take the transparency off of this copy that paste it over and do the same thing over here so we're going to go join cancel okay let's make sure we've got this parallel to this one over here so like that and get that into place right about there okay so there we go so there's our pickups in place and let's bring back our knobs okay all the hard work is pretty much done we've got all the hardware installed we've got the guitar fully modeled there's only really two things we left we need to do one is we need to apply some fillets to any remaining surfaces that we haven't and then apply appearances and like opening presents on christmas see what we got so let's go ahead and apply a fillet now i do already know that the way i did this end pin is going to give me a little trouble so what i'm going to do is i'm going to find that sketch and i'm going to apply my fillets right before that so let's roll history marker here and let's apply our fillets here before the cut two hours later okay guys i think we finally reached the point where we can apply appearances and it's like opening up a christmas present when you finally get to see it the way it's supposed to look so let's open up our appearance panel and let's apply our body color let's apply our laminated top color our fretboard and our nut and to the back let's apply the darker laminated top color okay and there we go that's looking a lot better it's looking like a real guitar now rather than my just you know highlighted colors for the modeling process let's go ahead and open up the render workspace and let's see what we've got hopefully this won't take too long to load all right everything is looking amazing while you guys weren't looking i secretly added in the potentiometer not potentiometer the switch that i forgot so that is now in there and wow i am really really happy with how this guitar turned out i hope you guys like it too it's certainly right up my alley may not be everybody's taste but i certainly love it so thank you all for joining me on this journey of how to build a guitar in fusion 360. i'd realize that this has taken a long time to get to this point but i'm finally i finally have a guitar model that i'm truly happy with and a lot of that as weird as it might seem is thanks to you guys for putting up with me and me learning a lot um including better ways to do that headstock transition better ways to do the neck transition and overall i ended up with a much better model than my original and i'm really happy with it everything's a lot cleaner and a lot of that again is thanks to you guys and this video process that we've been going through so check out my what's next for this channel video that i posted today i go over what my thoughts are on where i'd like this channel to go so i think going forward we're not going to be doing guitars as much although i am certainly open to doing more guitar work especially if you guys have a particular model that you're trying to do and it's not working for you but again thank you so much for joining me on this journey of how to build a guitar in fusion 360 and i'll see you on the next project

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 937

Keywords: Fusion 360, Guitar, Luthier, CNC, CAD, Design, Engineering, Lofting, Patch Tool, Hipshot, Stewmac, Truss Rod, EMG Pickups, Knobs, Tuners, Endpin Jack, Render, Fretboard

Id: oV5LNh6KdVc

Length: 51min 40sec (3100 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021