How to program CAM for flat guitar necks in Fusion 360 | Complete Tutorial

hello everyone my name is austin shainer and welcome back to my channel almost two months ago we kicked off this cam series with a simple gift box design so that way we could cover more of the fundamentals like setting up your stock your tools the differences between 2d and 3d tool paths and what options are available in each in the second part we covered order of operations which is basically a thought exercise on analyzing the constraints you'll need to pay attention to as you program the cam for your design so that way we order our tool paths in such a way that we produce successful parts in part three we went in depth on how to program a guitar body using my fixture method to help us with two-sided machining if you haven't watched those videos or you're just getting started with cam i definitely recommend you watch them first so that way everything i'm going to be doing in this video will make a lot more sense so today we're finally going to be programming the cam for the guitar neck that i produced on this channel if you'd like to see how i modeled this neck or the headstock you can check out my six part series or my more recent headstock transition videos links will be in the description below but fair warning this is going to be a pretty long video so if you'd like to skip ahead timestamps will be in the description below so let's not waste any more time and dig right in okay so jumping into fusion just like before let's take a second to analyze this neck and see what kind of constraints we need to pay attention to as we're programming the cam so constraint number one is that we have a two-sided design so if we take a second and hide our fixture and we flip this over you can see that on the top side we have our truss rod slot that we're going to need to mill out and we have a cutaway here so that way we have some string angle so that way they're not coming perfectly parallel out of the nut and what's interesting is this leaves us with one flat side so that way we know what we need to do is we need to machine this side first then flip it over and machine the other side and just like before i've set up a fixture system to help me with aligning these in both orientations which we'll talk more about in a second but basically i have a fixture that helps me align it on the top side and then when we flip the part over i have i have the same fixture just flipped to 180 so that way we can machine the other side constraint number two is that we have 3d surfaces meaning the headstock transition area and the neck and this heel transition these are not planar surfaces which that means we know that we're going to need to do some 3d roughing strategies and then come back in with a ball nose end mill and tidy those up and get a nice surface finish which also means that we're going to need at least one if not two or more tool changes as well and constraint number three is work holding because as we come around to cutting this final profile of the headstock and cutting the neck we're going to need access to that entire outer contour which means that we can't necessarily just hold on to it with clamps we can do it with tabs like i've mentioned in previous videos but that kind of complicates this area right here on the neck so the only area we'd really be able to hold on to is the heel and the headstock unless we wanted to actually come back and cut off and sand down the tabs on the neck so what i'm going to opt to do in this case is we're going to be using blue tape and super glue and if you're not familiar with this method basically what you do is you lay down a strip of blue tape and then you put ca glue on it and then you put a strip of tape on the other part that you're going to be gluing it to and then you spray the activator and then put them together and it will adhere and what's nice about that is it allows us to i hide my stock it allows me to basically use this entire surface right here as work holding so that way i don't have to actually clamp down once we flip the part over so on this side we can just use clamps on the stock but once i flip this part over i need access to all the entire outer contour so we're going to be using the blue tape method so just like in my previous video i'm going to be using a fixture to help me out with this and i'm going to go over this a little bit again because i feel like it's really important to understand but if you want more detail you can go back to my guitar bodies video where i go into quite quite great depths on it on why i do it this way but here's where this one changes a little bit so just like before i've got a fixture here with dowel pins that allows me to locate this fixture on my work bed of my cnc and then i've got dowel pin holes here and here as well so if i bring up my stock you can see that's what's going to hold that stock in place and locate it to the fixture and then i'm going to zero my work offsets on the fixture itself rather than off of the stock and if you remember back to my guitar body video the reason i do that is because i can't trust my table saw or the cutting tools i have in my shop to produce accurately square cuts on my stock and so what's nice about this again is that it divorces it from my it divorces my stock from my work offsets so all i really need to do oh i hided the wrong thing so all i need to do is make sure that my stock covers this surface right here as long as i do that it doesn't matter if it sticks over it's a little too long if it's not square in the corners because my work offset is relative to my dowel pins rather than my stock which is really helpful so all i need to do is basically make sure that my stock covers this area right here and it's the correct thickness which i can definitely do in my home shop now the one thing i did in this fixture that i did not do in the guitar body one is i added an extra channel around the actual perimeter of my neck and i only did it up until the headstock and there's a good reason for that so as we come in and you'll see this more later um when we're doing the simulations but as we come in on this back of the neck with a ball end mill i need that ball end mill to actually come all the way on the side of this and i don't want it just plowing into my fixture so i created a little recess here that is the depth of my ball end mill so i'm using a quarter inch ball end mill which means it has a 1 8 inch depth on the ball end and so my end mill can come all the way down into this channel as it's coming over and that helps me a lot with making sure that i don't just crash into my fixture okay so let's go ahead and jump into the manufacturing workspace and let's go ahead and get this started so i'm going to flip it over and i'm going to bring back my fixture for the top side again it's the same fixture all i did was i created a duplicate of it and flipped it over so that way i have a fixture on both sides so let's go ahead and let's set up our stock and let's start programming the top because we need to do that first then we'll flip it over and machine the other side so let's go create new setup and in that setup there we go just took a second in that setup we want to say our stock point is instead of model orientation sorry instead of stock box point let's do selected point and we're going to select the corner of my fixture and then we're going to say we want to instead of using model orientation let's select our x and y axes so i want my x-axis to be going in this direction and i want my y-axis to be going in this direction and you'll notice that the y is pointing in the correct direction but the x is pointing the opposite way so all i need to do is come over here and hit flip x which again will rotate it to from this side of the center point to this side so now i've got my x going to the right my y going back in my machine and my z going up so now what we need to do is select our model which is this one right here and then we'll say fixture we want to go ahead and let's open up our fixture and make sure we're selecting this component not the entire thing because that includes this component includes my stock so let's select that component as my fixture and then in stock i can say from solid and if i show my stock in this setup i can click right here and then there's my stock so i have my work coordinate system set up to the corner of the fixture i've got my model set up as my neck i've got my fixture set up which basically just allows fusion to detect when it's going to crash into it and throw an error for me and then i've got my stock which i modeled up okay so let's hide our stock because we don't need it anymore and let's go ahead and change this to top so we can see this a little bit better here should make the lighting a little bit more forgiving okay so the first thing we want to do is we're going to want to cut out the truss rod slot first because i typically use a quarter inch end mill for all of my roughing and finishing strategies but i only use an eighth inch when i need to get into smaller details and if we measure the distance between here and here you can see that it's short short of a quarter of an inch which would be 0.25 and since we're smaller than a quarter of an inch i need to you then use an eight inch end mill for this so i'm going to start off all my programs with an eighth inch end mill because this is the only time i'm going to use this bit as on the top side so we'll start we'll start there and then we will use a quarter inch flat for the remainder of the roughing and finishing and then we will flip it over and we will continue using that quarter inch without changing our work offsets so that way we avoid an excess or an extra tool change so let's go ahead and do 2d pocket so we'll go 2d pocket and let's go ahead and select this bottom edge right here and then our tool so if we come over the tool tab we want to say an eighth inch end mill our eighth inch flat which i've already added from the previous guitar video but if you if you don't know how to set up tools you can go back to that video and i show it quite in detail so i'm using 8 inch flat end mill i'm going to say 16 000 rpm which is the bottom range of my router which allows me to speed it up if i feel like i'm hogging out too much material at any given time and then cutting feed rate i tend to go a little bit more conservative with eight inch end mills so i'm going to go ahead and say 50 inches per minute i could probably go a little bit faster but that's okay i can always speed up the router to compensate and then heights right now it's set to selected contours or i could say selection face i tend to do that just to ensure that i'm going down to the depth that i want and then what is our top height well top height is from stock top which is right here so that's fine we don't need to change that and we can probably leave the feed height retract height and clearance height the same so i'm not going to touch those and then we'll come over here to the passes tab and let's say we want both ways so that way it's not just cutting in one then cutting another it's actually going to zigzag back and forth and then maximum step over we want to take less than half of our bit so i'm going to say 0.06 inches so that way it's a little bit less than our bit and stock to leave i'm not going to leave any axial which means going down into the slot so i'm going to say zero for axial and then radial i'm going to leave 20 thousandths of an inch so i can come back and fine tune that fit with my truss rod and make sure i get a dead on fit so we'll come back to that in a moment and then in multiple depths i'm going to say i don't want to take more than a sixteenth of an inch at a time which is half of my end mill i tend to be pretty conservative i didn't put a point there there we go tend to be pretty conservative with eight inch end mills as they can break pretty easily and that's looking pretty good i don't think we need any finishing passes so let's go ahead and let's say our start point or our entry point so if i come over into the linking tab and say entry positions i want to enter in from this side i don't want to enter in from the end because there's going to be a lead in and when there's a lead in it's going to leave a little bit of extra material or it's not leave a little bit it's going to cut a little bit of an extra and i want it to cut within the section that we're already going to be cutting some more in so i'm going to select right there and let's hit okay and see what happens okay so we've got a got our program here let's go and simulate it and see what it looks like and again i like to use comparison because i feel like it really helps me analyze am i actually getting through all the material and it helps me know if i have any stock still left over that i need to clean up so let's go ahead and hit play that's a little fast and let's do transparent so we can see it a little bit better and hide our body let's look at it from this angle yep okay so it's coming up and it's tapering back down on the way back so we should be good we don't have any errors and let's hide our transparency yes we did reach the bottom but we did not reach the sidewall because we left stock to leave so that's why this is still blue so that's perfect so i'm going to hit close on that one and what we're just going to do is we're just going to duplicate this for the next two so we're going to go you can either go create derived operation 2d milling and it will anything you select here will maintain the same selections and settings you set up on the previous one but instead what i'm going to do is i'm just going to right click and hit duplicate and then in this one i'm going to hit edit bring back my body and instead of this contour i'm going to set this contour and i should just be able to hit ok but let's see if i need to add any additional offsets no i do not because i added an additional one in there so we should be good there and then let's go ahead and on this one let's actually edit it real quick we're going to say no stock to leave because this is not a critical dimension it's just a cavity essentially for the spoke of my truss rod to sit in so i don't care if the sidewall here is you know a little off so i can just uncheck stock to leave so that way it hits the sidewall and then let's duplicate this one as well and in the final one i'm going to hit edit and i'm going to uncheck this one and check this bottom one now i've modeled in the radiuses here because i that way i could make sure that i had enough of a flat spot for my spoke to press up against as i'm tightening the truss rod um but essentially this is already set up for a 1 8 inch end mill uh so it's got a 16 of an inch radius right here hit okay and so that's kind of what we're left with and now we need to create a contouring um cleanup path so that way we can come up and tidy up this sidewall in here so let's go to this one and right click and say create derived operation 2d milling contour so that way it's going to maintain all my settings and my selections the only difference is that we're going to uncheck stock to leave okay that one's already unchecked and then multiple depths we're going to take off multiple depths we're going to do a full depth pass on this all the way up to the sidewall hit ok and i want to just check this to make sure there's no stock to leave or that there is stock to leave yes okay so we're good and let's go ahead and simulate this whole thing so far because i know we kind of rush through that but you'll get to see what happens so if i hit play it's going to take off sixteenth of an inch increments on this slot until it reaches the bottom and it's going to leave a little bit on the side of the wall there okay and then once it gets there there we go it's going to start cleaning up that portion of the slot and it's going to be green should be green on all sides let's see here doesn't look like it reached the bottom okay so we've got a problem there so let me close this come back to this one or this one right here edit and let's go make sure stock to leave is unchecked okay and then this one we need this selection to go down to this face i think that's where we screwed up before so on this one we didn't change our height tabs so if i go back to heights i can uncheck so you can see that i had this face still selected from the previous one because we duplicated it so uncheck and select that one as our bottom depth so we should have this one going down to the bottom of that this one going a little bit further down and this one a little bit further down let's simulate it one more time and make sure we're green on all sides except for this first pass on the sidewall okay so it should go until it's green right here speed that up a little bit okay yep we reached the bottom now and then on this back side for the spoke yes we reach the bottom there as well and now let me bring this back right here now we have a separate operation to come back in and tidy this up now oh i plunged right there so we're going to have to fix that but you can see it's coming in and cleaning up this blue section right here up until the sidewall that will be kept as a separate operation so that way we can just take a little bit a little bit more off each time so that way we can fine tune the side wall so we get a nice tight fit on our truss rod so let's go back into this one and check our entry positions or leads it lead-ins and lead-outs because that's typically when you see stuff like this that's typically where it's coming from so i'm going to come to linking and just uncheck lead in and uncheck lead out so that way it's just going to plunge so let's simulate this one more time and i'll speed it up so we don't have to watch the whole thing make sure we don't crash into our model at any point okay we are good that slot has been cut out and now we can move on to the headstock so the first thing we're going to want to do in order to start working on the headstock is we're going to want to cut a little bit of a contour around it so that way we can give our other tools when we come back in and clean up the surfaces more room to work with so let's go ahead and set up a 2d contour so 2d contour and let's change this to our quarter inch flat end mill so we'll do that's a ball end mill quarter inch flat that's a short one so we'll do our longer one okay and now what we need to do is pull up our sketches for our fixture let me see here okay so we're going to use this profile right here oh sorry not that one there we go the reason the reason i did this i created a separate sketch when i was building my fixture that had the entire profile of my neck because when i modeled the neck i didn't actually set up a sketch that looked like this and so it's actually quite difficult to select the individual portions of the neck when you have 3d geometry so instead i'm referencing a sketch for my contour and so you don't have to do it exactly like this but basically just make sure that you have a sketch of your entire outer contour of your headstock or not your headstock but your entire neck and you can use that as your cup as your cutting profile so let me go ahead and hide the sketches now so that's what we're going to use for our contour and in the heights tab we're only going to go down to the face of the headstock because when we flip it over we're going to end up cutting down the rest of the way but this just allows us to clear out enough material so that way we can work on the headstock so let's do passes and multiple depths because we're going to be plunging our way through so i'm going to do 16 of an inch depths and then multiple finishing passes so this way we do it in more than one radial pass so that will give us a bunch of extra space for our tool to come in and you'll see that in a second so i'm going to do two passes of 0.125 inches radially and let's hit okay and so you can see here i've got one pass on the outside and then i step in and create another pass and the whole point of that was just to give me a pretty large gap here so that way my other tools have more freedom on where they are cutting and so we are now good there and let's move on to the roughing strategy or the top of the headstock so if we hide this right here we need to use a 3d roughing strategy because we have varying curvature right here it's not like a straight wall down and so 2d has a little bit of a tough time with detecting what it should cut right here so we're going to do a 3d adaptive clearing you can click here or up here and make sure you have a quarter inch flat and yes our speeds are set up and then here's where a lot of people get stuck so stock contours is really important for these types of operations because if i just hit ok right now let me show you what it does you can see that what it's trying to do is it's trying to cut all of the available stock down to that depth and what we need to actually do is limit what portion of the stock we're allowing fusion to cut so that's what stock contours does so if i hit edit and i come back to here and i hit stock contours and i select this right here so by selecting this 3d geometry like this wing right here it allows me to select that entire contour and then it kind of projects that down and then says this is the only area of the stock that we're removing material from and then what i can also do if i i can come down to here to model and this allows you to kind of override what the automatically detected geometry is going to be so we can say even if there's other stuff within this we actually only want it to machine this surface and this surface we don't care about the holes we don't care about anything else just these two surfaces and so if i hit ok let's see what it looks like okay so i actually made a mistake as you can see here it's still cutting the outside so what we need to do come back in is we didn't set up our machining boundary so the stock selections covers what portion of the stock is it expecting to model or not model to cut but the machining boundary is actually what actually limits the tool of where it can go so this just limits the amount of stock but this limits the tool so we didn't have both of those set up so we can say selection machining boundary and we can say the same thing and so now we have both a green and a yellow line kind of on top of each other and we can say can the tool go outside of the boundary or does it need to stay within or does doesn't need to be on center so let's go ahead and say on center and see what happens okay now you can see that not only did we have the amount of stock to remove limited we also had where the tool was allowed to go and what surfaces it's cutting and so by doing it that way we ended up with much better result so but you can see that what it's doing is it's plunging down to the full depth and cutting that out and my cutter or my cnc can't handle that so we need to come back in and change it to multiple depths so if i come back in here to our passes tab and right now it says stock to leave but let's do a maximum roughing step down so there's no multiple depths in this feature but you can give it a maximum step down we'll do 0.0625 just like before and find step down this is when it's on like a tight contour right here do we want a different size step down or do we want it all to be the same and so i'm just going to go ahead and go ahead and make that exactly the same by doing .0625 and let's hit okay and see what happens okay it's generating that's looking pretty good let's do a quick simulation to make sure we don't run into any errors or anything like that so i'm just going to simulate these two now that we've got the truss rod cut and let's see do we have any errors to take a second it doesn't look like it so my tool is going to come around the boundary in two radial passes to give my tool some room and then it's gonna come in and do 16 of an inch increments whittling away this material right here so let's speed this up a little bit keep it going now we shouldn't see anything turn green because we did leave some stock to leave and that's totally okay so let's go ahead and hit ok or close and now we just need to actually come back in and clean up the rest of this and i'm going to show you a really neat trick that you'll use sparingly but occasionally it can be a game changer if you want to avoid a tool change so we're going to set up a parallel tool path to come in back and forth and clean up this area now we have a flat section right here so let me click off that we have a flat section right here and we have a curved section right here and ball nose end mills don't do a particularly good job of leaving a flat surface but they do a great job of leaving a nice surface on a curved section but if we look at our end mill so let me let me see if we can do this hold on so i'm actually just going to quickly open up a new design i'm going to show you what i'm talking about so if i make a quarter inch end mill let's just pretend this is an end mill for a second it obviously has a flat bottom but if you look at it from this angle like from an angle it doesn't have a flat bottom so if we're cutting let's say kind of like that then actually what we're using is basically a ball nose end mill and so i'm actually not going to change to a ball nose end mill to clean this up i'm going to use my flat end mill because when i'm on this surface it will be at an angle to this surface and so it actually will act like a ball nose end mill without having to do a tool change so let me show you that so let's do 2d actually know we want 3d parallel and we want to do set up the same things so we want to do a machining boundary let's do selection and we want to use this as our selection and then model we're going to say these surfaces right here and let's say that the tool can only go on center and then actually you know we're not going to do that we're going to say it can go outside the boundary and maybe we'll adjust that in a second and then heights we want it to go down to this surface right here and then in passes we don't need any multiple depths we don't need any stock to leave but if i just hit okay it's probably going to orient it this way and that will not work using this trick because you'll see that we're cutting with a sharp point from cutting in this orientation so we need to flip the orientation to be going in the y direction so let's go ahead go back to edit come over to passes and then the pass direction we're going to say 90 degrees from its current position hit ok and so now it's going in this direction and so let me go ahead and simulate this so you can see what i'm talking about but we will need to change our step over so we're going to simulate these two so it's going to mill out most of the material all the way down and then it's going to come in and you can see that it's it's cutting on that flat section right now but let's see if we can look at it from this angle as it's coming up and let's get a little bit further in okay let's slow it down so as it's coming up the surface it's acting like a ball nose end mill because we're dragging up and you can see it's leaving a cusp as if it's a ball nose end mill so we actually don't even need to switch tools at this point because of the orientation of this model so i hope i hope that's obvious what's going on here because since we're not cutting perpendicular but we're cutting essentially the cutter is at an at an angle to the surface that it's cutting it's acting like a ball nose end mill so i don't even have to switch tools so let's just hit play all the way through we didn't have any errors we didn't crash into our stock although this step over right here is a little a little extreme and it's not going to leave a nice surface finish so let's come back and change that real quick so let's right click this and hit edit come to passes and then step over right now it's half the tool so let's make it something pretty small so let's do 32nd of an inch hit ok and let's resimulate this so mill out most the hog out most of the material and now it's doing really fine little step overs you can actually see right here this might make it more obvious there's a curved section right here so it's actually acting like a ball end mill and it's leaving a nice flat surface on here which is great so we're kind of getting a two for one right now and yes everything turned green we've reached our final depth and we have just tiny little cusps that we can stand out once we're done so that's actually all we need to do for the top um although we could if we wanted to go ahead and bore these out so why don't we go and do that first since we're already here and we have access to this geometry we'll do that and then we'll flip the part over so let's go 2d boring operation and actually i'm going to hit no we can do this and then we'll select all of these circles right here and then we say in the heights do we want it to go to the bottom of the hole or do we want it to go to the bottom of the stock in this case let's just go ahead and go to the bottom of the stock so stock bottom and then actually we can go stock bottom minus a little bit because we'll end up hogging out that material later so that way we don't crash into our stock so let me go point three one two five or no sorry zero three one two five so we're gonna go just a thirty second above the bottom of the stock so you can see my volute right here kind of comes to that point so we're not going to reach all the way down which is great so we don't crash into our fixture hit okay and let's go ahead and simulate this entire setup so now we've got the top let's bring our fixture back okay so this is what it's going to look like and we can hide our model and let's simulate this whole thing so the first thing he did was we did an 8 inch end mill coming in the truss rod slot and hogging out most of that material and then it starts cutting out the remainder for the spoke and then it comes up and does a cleaning pass and then switches to a quarter inch end mill and then we start doing the contour around the body or not the body but the neck and then it's going to now that there's material there or material removed and we have enough clearance for that bit we can come in remove most of this material almost there and we didn't have any stock delete or we did leave some stock to leave so it's not green yet and now we're using our flat end mill to both cut a flat planar surface on the top of the headstock but also a little bit of a ball and mill action on this cutaway and we are reaching all the way down to the holes right here so we're good there and then last but not least we come back in and bore those holes so that gave us all of the all of the geometry that we needed access to from this side done and now all we have to do is flip the part over and start working on the other side so i'll see in a second all right so let's close this out and let's bring in our other fixture and show our body again so now we have our part flipped so we had the other fixture where it was like this and now we have to just switch our fixtures flip the part around and now we're ready to start setting up for the other side so let's go ahead and create a new setup give it a second to load and what we're going to do is we're going to say the exact same thing we did before so origin point selected point this corner and let's set our x and y axes so x will be here y will be here and then we'll flip our x so it goes from this side to the other side and then we'll do model is our neck fixture is this component in here so that one right there and then our stock is from solid and is that body right there so that should be our setup it's nice and easy because we did all the work up front and so now what we need to do since we still have our quarter inch bit is to go ahead and do a contouring operation so that way we give ourselves or our bit some more room when we're doing the 3d roughing strategies so we kind of preemptively avoid some of those rapid collision into our stock errors so let's set up a 2d contour on the headstock but only the headstock for now so that way we can leave some tabs on the headstock so it doesn't break free on us so let's go ahead and do a 2d contour and we still have the tool and let's go contour selection now if you hold down the alt key you can select individual pieces rather than the entire thing so we can say here here and here yes the red arrows are on the correct side and then we can set up tabs and before we do that let's go ahead and set our heights so we'll go heights is to selection this face and then we'll do negative 0.25 that way we go down to the depth that we cut the other one on the front side and then let's do tabs and then we can set the height of the tabs to whatever height and width we want so let's do width of let's say 0.75 give ourselves some pretty pretty meaty tabs and then let's do the tab height as 0.625 should be fine yeah we'll work with that hit okay and let's do a quick check so let's hide our let's hide that and let's simulate across these two so let's simulate both of these real quick simulate and we'll speed up through this so we go down to that surface we cut through and then we flip over to the other side and we have some it's giving me an error which is a rapid collision with fixture but that's just because i'm simulating both of these and it thinks the fixture is right here so that's okay we can ignore that for the time being and let's play through that let's take off stop on collision let's see did we go all the way through no we did not so we might need to go back and adjust that so let's adjust this height here of how deep do we cut that contour on the front side so let's go back to that contouring operation right here we're going to change our heights to we'll go from there minus 0.25 so we'll go .25 down from the top and then we just need to make sure that when we do the other side we're cutting to that same depth and then we'll leave ourselves some tabs so we'll hit ok go back to this let's check that real quick contour yes that is going deeper and then it's cutting that okay so we'll go back to the other one let's check our heights so we want to go to selection this face which is the top one negative 0.25 in fact actually in this case we want to go the other way we want to go 0.25 down so that way we go to the same height but in this case we're flipped over and we can leave some tabs so yes there we go we have some tabs roughly in the middle let's make these a little bit taller so 0.125 and that should give us some nice tabs in the middle there we go okay and then we can just clean those up with a chisel or sand it down etcetera hit okay let's go back to our passes real quick and do multiple depths of 0.065 inches and then we want the same thing on the other side where we had two finishing passes so that way we give ourselves a little bit more breathing room and we'll do two finishing passes of a .125 radial cut hit okay let's see that's looking a little better so let's simulate let's simulate these again real quick and see what that looks like so we're cutting on this side first let's speed this up to right here okay we cut that contour down now we're finishing that come through it's going to think we're hitting the fixture so we have a few errors and then on this side it's clearing that out now we're not actually hitting the fixture in this case because the fixture doesn't exist on this side so i'm not worried about that error let's see if those tabs cut all the way through yes they do so we effectively cut through both sides but we left the tabs there so that should be good and that will allow us to clear out this side of the headstock so let's go ahead and do that and then we'll clear out the neck so if we come back to this setup we go 2d actually 3d adaptive clearing still have our quarter inch flat and stock contours we'll select this right here uncheck rest machining the machining boundary will be the selection right here again and then heights we want to go down to this surface and then the top is still stock top and then we want to be able to go both ways 0.1 in each direction and we don't need any no need directions or slot clearing so let's change our maximum step down to 0.0625 actually maximum step down we can do 0.125 in this case and .0625 as a fine step down because the actual depth of this relief right here is only an eighth of an inch in my design and then i'm gonna allow it to have a sixteenth of an inch step down on this on this little curvature right here so stock to leave yes we still want that that should be good but let's check our entry positions because sometimes what will happen is it will try to decide where it wants the bit to enter from and it will just collide with the stock so we can actually ensure that that doesn't happen by choosing an entry position somewhere on our model so i'm just going to say i want the bit to enter around this hole and we can say okay that's looking good i don't see it engaging anywhere but let's see if we run into any simulation errors we shouldn't doesn't look like it okay so we are going to cut a contour real quick just give our bit some room and then we're going to come in and do an adaptive clearing see if we can see a little better there we go on this back side of the headstock yep so we are good there and we can actually still do the same trick with this bit so we don't have to do a tool change yet and we can go ahead and do a parallel pass on that so let's do 3d parallel and we're going to say see model we'll do model surfaces these surfaces right here the tool containment boundary will be selection right here there is no stock contours on these because these tool paths assume that the stock has already been removed and we'll say that the tool can be on center on the boundary rather than outside the depth will be to this surface right here and then we don't need any multiple depths we don't need any we can change the step over to 0.03125 and that should be good let's see what happens okay so we did forget to change the direction the pass direction of that so let's go back to edit pass is and then the pass direction we'll say 90 degrees so that way it flips it for us and we can clean up that surface right there so now all we need to do is clear out the rest of this material and then with this bit and then come in with a ball nose end mill and do all of our final touches so let's go ahead and do that so what we're actually going to do first is we're going to do another contouring operation kind of like what we did with the headstock but this one will allow to go all the way down to the bottom because our model actually extends all the way down so let's bring our fixture back make sure we don't run into that and let's go 2d contour still have our quarter inch flat and then our contour or let's see we don't need well we will need tabs in a moment but we'll do it on the back side just to be sure and then our contour selection will be bring back our sketch and maybe we can pull it from there we're going to select these contours right here just this portion of it like that come around i'm holding the alt key while i'm doing this so that way i can select just a piece of it there we go so we're going to cut that contour and we can say tangential extension and we'll go out like an extra 0.1 or quarter of an inch so that way we go past and make sure we clear it go ahead and hit let's just hit ok see what it gets i know that it's going to plow through that so it looks like let's try multiple depths real quick and see what it does so passes multiple depths 0.0625 inches hit okay so we're still getting an error message it looks like with the lead outs okay so we're going to take off our lead-ins and lead-outs so let's uncheck lead in and lead out hit okay check again so it looks like it is still having some issues here it might have selected the wrong piece let's go back to our let's go edit okay that's what happened so you can see that the little red arrow is on the wrong side of the line so let's go flip that over check these ones too while we're at it this one looks like it's on the wrong side as well okay that all looks good let's see if that gives us a better result yes that's what we were looking for much better so that was my mistake because i forgot to flip those arrow directions and you can see that we're breaching past so let's simulate this real quick and see what this looks like let's hide our sketches okay so we are milling out most of the material on the back side of the headstock and then while we're doing a contour now we're doing milling out most of the material and we left ourselves some tabs and now we're doing our finishing pass with the flat end mill okay and now we're doing a contouring operation in 16th of an inch depth increments that is extending all the way past like this out picking up coming back to the other side and continuing where it left off and actually we might want to do that in two different passes to give ourselves our bit a little bit of extra breathing room so let's go back one more time edit and let's do passes multiple finishing passes to 0.125 like we did on the other one okay let's simulate this one more time make sure we're good there and then we can hog out the rest of that material okay clearing it out left ourselves some tabs finishing pass and then we're taking two sets of contouring passes we don't have any errors so this is great okay so what's nice about that is that kind of helps take care of this corner as well so our bit doesn't necessarily need to cut nothing when it's using a ball end mill right here that might be kind of hard to explain but you might see what it means a little bit later so now we can go ahead and just clear out the rest of this material now it is important to remember that we just cut all the way through this and so that comes down to work holding so in this case on this side we left some tabs so we didn't have an overhanging headstock but on the underside of this like i mentioned at the beginning of the video i'm going to be using double sided tape so i have access to this entire outer contour or not double sided tape but blue tape with the super glue method and so that means i don't necessarily need to leave any tabs on this back side although it might be smart just in case later on i take this off and i want to put it back on the machine to refinish something i'm going to go ahead and opt not to do that in this case so let's close this out and now let's do our big 3d adaptive to clear out all this material so let's go up to 3d adaptive clearing and then we still have our quarter inch flat the operation after this we will be switching to a ball nose so we can go geometry stock contours in this case let's bring up our sketches and say our stock contours is going to be that same sketch we've been using and then uncheck rest machining and then geometry the boundary we're going to do the same thing selection that sketch and now we can hide our sketch and then if we go into our heights tab we can say the bottom height we want it to cut down to the fixture height and then we can say passes we want it to do it in 0.065 increments on all both the fine and the rough and then we can say both ways 0.1 optimal load would be great and then we'll leave some stock as well and then i think this should be good so let's see what happens we may need to add some entry positions if we get an error so let's add that in there let it load up for a second it's a pretty big tool path so it might take a minute okay we've got a lot of links but that might not be a problem but we might be able to change that in a second okay so let's simulate this portion right here it doesn't look like we're running into any errors which is great so we're cutting the contour speed this up a little bit then we're clearing out all of this material right here okay it looks like it is trying to cut into the headstock so we're going to need to limit that a little bit yep it's trying to cut the headstock so we're going to have to limit that let's go through the rest of this real quick okay so now we have most of the material hogged out over here and we still have stock to leave on all surfaces we will need to probably come back and flatten this piece out right here but we need to tell it that it can't touch the headstock so let's close this out bring back that tool path hit edit and in the geometry tab we can select the specific model surfaces so let's see if this let's see if this fixes it we're going to select all of our model surfaces here that we want it to cut we don't need it to cut the outside ones because the contour already did that and let's see if that solves it okay it did not you can see that it's still trying to cut the headstock so let's come back again let's do geometry and let's i think it has to do with our machining boundary so let's change this to let's see if we can manually select features here let's actually go back to where we had it before so let's hit cancel bring this back up and in our stock contours let's add this section right here and see if we can basically exclude that from it hit ok and let's see what happens again it's a pretty big tool path it does look like it's finally doing it although it does look like we have a lot of linking operations so we might need to come back and change that but yes it is no longer touching the headstock which is exactly what we want so let's see if we can reduce the amount of links here because you can see that it's picking up a lot and traveling all the way over so let's go back to edit and let's come over to our linking tab and let's see what we've got here so we're prioritizing a full retraction so let's say minimum retraction and then let's see allow rapid retract yes maximum stay down distance so this might be something we need to look at so let's try extending this because basically what this does is if the next feature that it needs to start cutting is beyond this length then it will go ahead and fully retract all the way and travel over if it's not within that distance or if it is within that distance so let's say it's coming from here to here it won't do a full retract so let's make this quite a bit longer so this is probably going to be like 16 inches so let's make it 12 inches and let's see what happens it might be able to significantly reduce the amount of linking it is looking much much better it's maybe not perfect but let's simulate that real quick okay it's still picking up quite a bit let's go back and look at this so we still have a lot of links once we get down into these bottom sections there so maybe we can extend that a little bit more let's say it's 16 inches okay and let's try this might not change much and that's okay i also wonder if we have both ways selected i need to go back and check that that might impact that a lot actually let's go back real quick and check we do have both ways selected all right we might have to just deal with that so let's go ahead and simulate the whole thing got the headstock backside finishing pass contour and then we're hogging out most of the material so that way we can come in and clean everything up okay so let's go ahead and do let's cut this surface right here because we don't want to cut that with a ball end mill so let's do that with a flat end mill and then we'll do our final pass with the ball end mill and get this thing looking all nice so let's close that out and let's just do a [Music] let's do 2d pocket i wonder if we can do it with a 2d pocket let's find out quarter inch flat still and we want to cut this surface right here and let's go ahead and just click ok and see what it does okay so it's not going to cut the whole thing let's go back to edit geometry and let's see if we can extend that let's do rest machining no we don't we shouldn't need that 2d pocket might be the wrong answer for this in fact you know what we can do we can do a facing operation so let's actually delete this come on there we go and let's do a face operation on let's see stock contours right there and then the bottom height instead of the model top it'll just be this section right here let's see if that works you can clean that up okay pretty pretty close actually not bad it is leaving a little bit of material up here which might not be a big deal but let's go ahead and see if we can adjust that we will change our passes our past direction to going in the y direction and then our step over we'll make one half the bit in fact let's just do point one do both ways and maybe if we do it that way maybe we can extend the tool path a little bit that's already much much better so let's go ahead and extend the tool path just a little bit so we can come back to the geometry tab or sorry not the geometry the passes tab and we can do pass extension of 0.125 that should extend the length of that yes by 0.125 although right here it might collide with the stock so let's just double check that real quick so let's simulate i wonder if there's an error with collision with stock oh that was way too fast hold on speed this up slow it down and look at it from the top no it is not colliding with the stock so that is great so we can go ahead and use this as a cleanup tool to clean up that face for us perfect so now we're at full depth there and now we're going to switch our tool to a ball end mill so let's go ahead and set up a parallel tool path like we did with here but we're going to do it with the ball end mill so come up to here 3d parallel and we could do a scallop or parallel or a bunch of others i do like parallel for this operation on the body i preferred scallops i don't think it's quite as critical here and i think you get a really nice result with a parallel path on this one so in this case we're going to switch it from our flat to a ball end mill so i want my quarter inch ball and then our machining boundary we will do selection and let's go ahead and choose actually let's do bring back that sketch select right here we're going to say tool outside of boundary and then down here we can say we can specify exactly what surfaces we either want to avoid or which ones we want it to touch i think that's where i was getting screwed up earlier because the model section just tells you what mo what surfaces you want to machine but this one is more exclusive and it says only touch or avoid these surfaces so i can say so if i say touch it's going to force it to touch those ones if it's unchecked it's going to avoid those surfaces so what we can do is leave it off and say we want to avoid these surfaces right here all together and let's see if that does it and let's go to our selection let's go down to this surface right here let's take off our sketches and then we can come over to passes and let's make our pass direction 90 degrees because right now it defaults to x so we want it to go in y you could do it in x and i'll show you that in a second and we don't need any multiple depths and our step over will be 0.03125 just like before but this time with the ball end mill this is looking good this is looking very promising so we told it to avoid these surfaces and these surfaces and so all it's doing is touching these outside ones so you could do it with this kind of a pass direction if you wanted to or you could come back to edit passes and flip that direction back to zero and that will cut in the x direction that's actually a really good way to do it as well it does take a little bit longer because you have many more connecting um connecting features so the cnc will have to stop come back the other direction whereas in these ones it's one continual cut if you do it the other way so let's go ahead and go back and let's change it back to 90 degrees hit ok so now it's cutting in this direction so that should be good although it doesn't look like it's going all the way to the top so we might need to change our contact point boundary so let's check that real quick let's go edit in the geometry tab we can say contact point boundary what this does as you can see on the screen is it allows the tool to go beyond the boundary so long as it's still touching the features that we want to machine so let's check that let's see if it lets us go all the way to the top that's looking much much better still not quite there but let's go ahead and simulate it and see if everything turns green and if it does then we're good to go so let's simulate the whole operation got the headstock contour tabs clearing it out finishing pass then a contour on the neck all the way down and then we do our roughing strategy to clear out most of that material we do have an error message back there so we'll check that in a minute and then we do a facing operation to come back in and clean up that surface okay so it is having to go vertical a lot there so maybe it would be good idea to do 90 degrees in this case because you can see what it's trying to do it's just whittling away that corner and then it can finally pick up steam so let's keep watching it's gonna do the same thing to the other side it's not ideal okay and now it's setting up to go ahead and do the long passes let's fast forward this a little bit okay so it did actually end up touching and cutting all of those surfaces even though i was worried about that so that's good that means we do have a good program it's just maybe not ideal for the way i set it up so let's go ahead and flip that back the other direction and see if we get a better result in these corners let's go edit passes change this back to zero degrees and let's see if it shows up a little bit better we won't simulate the whole thing again so simulate okay so it's going to come up there it's going to work its way up the neck actually pretty satisfying to watch okay let's see what it does when we get up here to the neck or the headstock i mean okay slow this down a little bit okay so it's still doing it but in a much better fashion than what it was before so i'm not terribly upset with that actually it's still not ideal but i guess that's just the nature of the game right here so it's it still does have to do it but not nearly as bad as it was the first time so let's hide our body the actual model that's what we're left with so you know what i think that's pretty good so let's go ahead take off our fixtures and simulate the whole thing not take off but hide our fixtures and simulate the whole thing so we can see what the actual body we're left with is because right now it's it's not showing you really the tabs so let's go ahead and close this out let's hide our fixture and let's simulate both setups together okay now again remember it's going to show a bunch of errors because it's expecting the fixture to be there so we don't actually care about these errors that we're seeing right here so let's go ahead and play we're taking our eighth inch end mill cutting out the truss rod slot at least the main portion of it and then it's going to come in and cut this half of it and then this half so let's speed this up a little bit there you go it's cutting that side then that and then we have one remaining tool path that we can use to come clean up and and fine tune the dimension of this for our truss rod slot okay and then it's doing a contour of the whole neck down a little bit past the headstock and then we're clearing out the material on the front of the headstock and then we're doing the finishing pass with the little trick so we're still using the flat end mill here okay let's speed this up again and then we're going to come in and cut those holes and now we flipped over to the other side and now we're cutting a contour on just the headstock itself so that way we can leave ourselves some tabs again ignoring the errors right now because it's expecting the fixture to be here so i can show you what it what it thinks is happening uh where is it so it thinks that every time it's plunging into this it thinks it's ramming itself right into this headstock or not headstock this fixture so that's that's why it's throwing all those errors okay clearing that out and then we're doing a finishing pass with the flat end mill so we're able to do a lot with one tool change and that was kind of the point so we didn't have to spend you know changing our tools six seven eight times in a row and then we're cutting a contour around the edge and then we're going to hog out most of the material okay once most of that's gone then we're gonna do a little tiny little facing operation just to clean up the neck pocket almost there okay clean up that net pocket and flatten it out and then we're doing our big parallel tool path to clean up and get a really nice surface finish and prevent a lot of sanding going forward so the total machining time for this neck the way i programmed it for my machine is about two and a half hours um that's obviously a still pretty long run time but not terrible actually considering the complexity of the model we're trying to machine obviously if i had a bigger machine and i could use larger bits then i could definitely take more material off at any given time and really speed this up and get it down to you know within an hour or so but i'm pretty happy with how this is turning out so let's speed this up a little bit okay going up the neck and then those tiny little cuts right there and let's check do we have blue anywhere remaining on the model we're good there we're good in the holes we are good all the way around there's a tiny little piece right there looks like but if that actually shows up in the model that i'd be surprised that might just be a graphical thing and be easy to stand out regardless so and then you can see that we actually did successfully cut all the way through and leave some tabs for our headstock so this would be the actual finished piece that we would be pulling off of our cnc and we can just cut those off and pair them away with a chisel and sand it flush phew that ended up taking a lot longer than i thought but thank you to everybody who stayed with me for the whole thing guitar necks are definitely the most challenging part of the guitar to machine they have a very complicated shape and they require a pretty good understanding of our cam tools in order to get good results with so the only thing i think that would really top this is an angled neck and that's a story for another video if you'd like to support my channel and help me to continue to produce high quality content or would like to actually download this file for your own reference in your designs you can find me at patreon.comaustinchaner if you have any questions about this process or would like help from myself or other viewers on something you're working on you can join our discord channel where we share ideas problem solve and just have a good time thank you all for coming i hope to see you in the next video this is austin signing out

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 1,995

Keywords: Autodesk Fusion 360, CAD, CAD Modeling, CAM, CAM Basics, CNC, CNC Router, DIY, Fusion 360, Fusion 360 Beginner, Fusion 360 CAM, Fusion 360 CAM Guitars, Fusion 360 CAM Tutorial, Fusion 360 Tutorials, Guitars in Fusion 360, Tutorials, Xcarve, fusion 360 tutorial, Autodesk, 2D Toolpaths, 3D Toolpaths, CAM Toolpaths for Guitars, CAM for Guitars, 2 Sided Machining, CAM for Guitar Necks, Toolpaths for Guitar Necks, Guitar Necks Fusion 360, CAM Guitar Necks

Id: Ieyf3c9x78U

Length: 75min 52sec (4552 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021