Machining the Body | Project Mehr | Guitar Build Log Part 5

hey everybody this is austin and welcome back to my channel in the last video we glued on the fretboard to our neck flipped it over and brought it all the way up to 220 grit so that way we have it ready for finish and then finally installed the frets now the reason why i went ahead and made the neck first rather than the body first is because i believe it is better to make a body to match your neck so that way you can get that neck pocket and the heel dimensions correct rather than making a neck to match your body so that is the plan for today we are finally going to be making the body for this guitar and i am so excited now we are basically going to be following the exact same process that i laid out in my cam for guitar bodies video with a few minor alterations because of the timeline in what it took for me to get my top book matched so if you haven't seen that video or you'd like more information about this process or the tool paths i'm using you can go and check out that video and i will leave a link down in the description below so let's not waste any more time and let's turn a chunk of mahogany and walnut into a killer guitar body like this all right so first order of business is we need to go ahead and cut the fixture for the body now i'm hopefully going to learn my lesson from the last time where i ended up not measuring the hole to hold distance on my dowel pins and ended up crashing right into my t-slots so let's learn our lesson there so i'm going to go ahead and measure that out and it's 21.25 inches so right about there and so yes i as long as i place it within about about an inch and a half of the edge of one of the t-slots i will be totally fine and not crash into my t-slot so i'm gonna go ahead and place the fixture probably right about let's see what dowel pins we have already we'll place it right about there that should be pretty good so we'll line it up with our hole pins here so we'll go ahead and place the zero point for this fixture right about here basically right in front of this dowel pin but about an inch inch and a half in and that should be perfectly fine and i won't run into any other my other dowel pin holes okay that's not going anywhere okay we're just gonna go down in one thousand increments from here until we see it touch that's looking pretty good let's feel it yep it's just starting to scrape so we are good to go okay so i'm gonna set that as x y z zero real quick and that's going to be the starting point so that is going to rough the center point of this bit is going to reference the corner of this fixture okay let's jog our z to a safe height get it off the get it off the fixture and we're gonna go ahead and power this guy up and run it and i'll see you guys in a minute i paused it there for a second because what happened is i placed my contouring operation ahead of my dowel pins and that would be a problem because then once this breaks free i'm going to immediately lose alignment to wherever the dowel pins would be so i went ahead and paused it when it went up for a z travel to move to the next depth and i'm going to export a separate dowel pin operation run that first and then finish the contour so i'm going to go ahead and stop this program and we're going to upload the dowel roughing we're going to use the same xyz 0 so we don't have to reset anything right there and let's go ahead and turn it on okay so just like on the neck fixture this is still definitely too tight because my cnc tends to make these a little bit small now i didn't have any stock to leave in the operation when i ran that and so some of that is probably my bit diameter is a little small but also my calibration is maybe slightly off this is a .375 machined dowel pin and it kind of wants to go in but not really so i'm going to rerun a new operation with negative stock to leave and go ahead and open up that hole diameter until we get a better fit now i'm going to learn my lesson from the last time because last time i made these way too tight and that caused me a ton of problems when trying to get the part off so i'm definitely going to take my time and get this fit more of like a nice glide fit rather than a really tight fixture um not fixture but um pressure fit let's say friction fit that's what i was looking for not a tight friction fit that i have to you know hammer in or anything so i will be right back i'm going to change the stock to leave and then we'll open those up okay so i took out an extra 5000 on the program so i'm going to upload my sizing program and we're going to go ahead and send this back to x0y0 [Music] we're going to turn on the spindle and run it went ahead and paused the program so we only do one hole get the size right then go do all the holes and make sure we're good that is actually perfect so if you see this it drops in a little bit on the top but then i actually have to still squeeze it down to get it in it's like a perfectly like nice glide fit so i am way happier with that fit than i was on the last go around so let's just go ahead and turn the spindle back on and continue playing it okay well something happened so let me bring you over to the computer i got an error in the program for some reason i don't know why so what i'm going to go ahead and do is i'm going to send raise it up send it back to zero [Music] and we're just going to rerun that program and see what happens now it doesn't look like yeah it doesn't look like i lost my zero my zero is still where i expect it to be okay so i've reloaded the program i'm going to turn on the spindle and let's rerun it and see what happens we're good everything looks good we just had a little bit of a problem right there but it still goes all the way down and recheck our fit real quick yes this one is still good let's check the one we had a problem with over here yes perfect fit even though we had that little section right here um that went off to the side it didn't actually go all the way down um and i stopped it ahead of time so we're totally fine there perfect and this one perfect i love the way those fit so much easier i can still get them out but they're nice and actually tight so they still require a little bit of force to go in but i can still get them out if i need to so i'm happy i'm going to pull up my contouring operation and we're just going to go ahead and rerun that now it's going to cut air for a little bit because we already did one layer of it but that's okay and then it will finish it up in fact actually before we do that let's go ahead and install some dowel pins get those in there so that way this doesn't start moving on me let's go and turn it on and let's run it [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so the fixture is cut now i did not cut the center dowel pins for the part here because my intention this time is to do that with the part at the same time because that's when i got the good results last time when i did them separately it was a problem so this is now cut the dowel pins are in so it won't move if i take these clamps off we're gonna go ahead and remove these so far this has been a way better experience than the last time for sure all right and pull that one off okay let me get my cnc mostly out of the way here so we're still using the same x zero y zero we're not gonna hit my dowel pin so we're okay there [Music] okay let's pull this off and vacuum up a bit [Music] so our blank will roughly sit like that and you know i think what i might do is just run a center line down the middle here um maybe i'll just trace it down so that way we can get this lined up pretty well but so what we'll end up doing is we'll use a little double-sided tape or just clamps either one would be fine um cut our dowel pin hole all the way through it through the fixture and the part at the same time and then we can go ahead and start cutting this block okay so i'm gonna go ahead and mark a center line with a marking knife here i was gonna do a v bit going up the fixture i don't want to have to change my bit or change my offsets etc so this fixture is exactly 14 inches so i'm just going to use a combination square here set to 7 inches and then i'm just going to line it up right here and give myself a little bit of a marking so i just did a little marking right here that just establishes my center point so that way i can line up the blank okay so just to make sure that the double-sided tape sticks really well i'm gonna go ahead and use a little bit of alcohol and just clean this really well make sure it's degreased free of dust or anything else so one thing i really like about these phenolic top for fixtures is they're really easy to clean and make sure that the tape will always stick the way you expect it to okay so i'm going to do one strip of tape down the center now i don't need a ton of holding power here because i'm also going to be using clamps this is mostly to keep the body from sliding around on this slick surface so i'm going to do it not over top of my center line here if i can avoid it and i actually learned that was a big problem when i made the fretboard is that i my fretboard basically covered that entire surface and i slathered the glue on there and it made it a nightmare to get my fretboard off which was a big problem so i'm not going to use nearly as much just enough to kind of keep it in place so i don't have to worry about it okay so this is actually going to be the show side which is going to be the back side of the guitar now in my cam for guitar bodies video i did the front side then the laminated top then the back first i've kind of decided to switch the order of operations around i'm going to do the back first then flip it over cut the channel for the cable routing and then glue on the top and part of the reason for that is i have to get this all done today and we're going to be headed over to someone's house later to go ahead and bookmatch the top and when i come back from that i need to be almost done with the guitar so i'm going to do the back side first and this is going to be our show side so this is the side we're not going to put tape on we are going to put tape on that side just get it mostly as close to center as possible but not covering everything up that should be good okay burnish that down a little bit make sure it's nice stuck on there do the same for this just kind of brush it down a little and let's grab our super glue now you all gave me a big amount of grief for using my hands last time so in this case i'm just going to do that i am not going to be slathering it around with my hands again it's not super critical spray some activator on here like that okay and it's going to go this direction let's get that lined up as carefully as we can [Music] so [Music] hmm [Music] um [Music] so [Music] hmm [Music] hmm so now that the back is done i headed over to matt franson's house of france and guitars to bookmatch the walnut top now unfortunately i don't have access to a bandsaw so a few weeks ago i put out a request on the guitar building with cnc facebook group for anyone in the seattle area who'd be willing to do this for me as it turns out matt only lived about 10 minutes from my house and hit me up i ended up paying matt about 20 dollars and a case of beer for him just to split the top for me but matt was really kind enough to go ahead and run it through his drum sander and join the two mating edges for me as well that ended up saving me a ton of machining time now unfortunately we weren't able to get a perfect book match as the saw got a little bit bound up on a knot in the wood but that was no worries i took care of the rest with a facing operation on the cnc when i got home so matt i'd just like to say thank you so much for doing this for me as sure as that will be resawing this by hand and it was a pleasure talking with you and getting to see your shop if you guys would like to see matt's work you can find him at francine guitars on facebook now before i can glue on the book match top i actually need to go ahead and flip the part over and cut the other side of the control cavity and the wiring channels that are going to be hidden underneath the top so i was trying to get the part aligned here and i apologize for the lack of audio because i actually got a little bit tunnel visioned but the dowel pins were going in way too tight for some reason and even though even if i hammered them home i was really worried about being able to get the part off successfully so instead of using blue tape like i normally would with this i went ahead and opted to use clamps instead so that way i wouldn't have glue holding me back of getting the part off and instead i just might might need to pry it a little once i need to take it off to glue on the bookmatch top so i got everything clamped down and went ahead and brought the cnc over and started cutting now at this point i immediately realized something was wrong because not only were my feeds and speeds too aggressive i also noticed that the channel was not cutting quite on center and i wasn't sure if that was actually correct or not and so i went ahead and let it run so i just turned up the speed a little bit just to make sure now you can see me here i'm checking the center line and i'm starting to panic a little that something might be a little wrong and in hindsight i was right and i should have stopped the machine what ended up happening is when i set my work offset for the bit i forgot to send it set it to the center of the bit and instead i set it to the outside of the bit and so my work offsets were off by an eighth of an inch diagonally and so that caused these channels and the other side of the control cavity to not cut correctly and you'll see here in just a second what that ended up looking like so as you can see there was a big misalignment problem it was an eighth of an inch diagonally and it actually took me a little while to figure out exactly what caused that until i went to go check my work offsets and then it had dawned on me so for the wiring channels i went ahead and re-cut those exactly as is but with the correct work offsets and allowed them to be wider than i had intended in my design um that didn't really matter too much because they're going to be covered up by the laminated top anyway and the ends of those are going to get re-cut when i cut the pickup cavities but as for the control cavity what i ended up doing was taking the recess for the cap on the back and just pushing that same geometry to the front side that's underneath the laminated top and what that allowed me to do was basically expand the contour of that and ended up correcting my mistake was just left a little bit of an undercut and so it changed the geometry of my cavity a little bit but nothing that i'm going to be end up being worried about and in the end it ended up turning out nice and i'm pretty happy with it okay so here's my book match top what you're actually seeing here is the the back side of it which is not book matched the book mesh side is on the underside and the reason for that is i need to face this side flat because my glue up wasn't perfectly straight and there's a slight bow in it after the glue up so i need to actually surface this flat so i'm going to establish one flat face right here and then flip it over and then machine it down to thickness and this will be actually the side that gets glued to the top or to the body rather so i just like in the fretboard i went ahead and created a custom nc program to just kind of skim the surface so we're gonna go ahead and do that flip it over get it down to its correct thickness and then we'll glue it onto the top and keep going all right so we've got the back of the body machined and everything is ready on that side and then we've got the channels and the cavity cover with our fixed mistake ready for the book match top to be glued onto it so that's what we got to do now so i went ahead and i checked both sides even though i intended one side or the other and even though we've got this little divot here this is still the better side and as you can tell this blank is large enough for me to go ahead and glue that down without including that so i think we're going to go ahead and still use this side because this side came out better i don't know if that's coming out on camera but there's a bit of a color mismatch between here and here which i'm not super happy with so that's going to be our top so let's go ahead and set that down right there and i've already lined it up where i want it to glue and i've made some markings so that way it's easy for me to get everything centered up where i want it and what i'm gonna do because i don't have a bunch of clamps that can really clamp down on the center here i basically just got these and some pistol style clamps and so what i actually have is i have a bunch of these one-inch aluminum plates i've got three of them each one is probably at least 30 40 pounds maybe a little bit more that i can go ahead and set on the center as my primary clamping pressure on the top but then i can use the clamps around the sides to secure my alignment so the process the way i'm thinking of doing it is getting it lined up putting the glue or putting the glue on getting it lined up clamping down on four corners to secure that alignment then putting all these plates on and maybe putting one two more on the sides here and then calling that good until the morning all right so let's go ahead and do this so um i think i'm just going to use a chip brush for the primary application because i don't really have a good spreader and i don't really feel like using my entire hand on this so i'm going to use this for most of it and i'll pick out any um any bristles that might come off in the process so let me see if i can get the majority of the loose ones out ahead of time that's looking pretty good i'm not pulling any more out so that's good okay so i'm just going to put a bunch of glue in here squeeze a good amount this should be good if not get more okay get this nice and saturated and let's start going yeah i'm definitely gonna need more but that's okay i'm gonna need probably two or three times that okay and let's keep going just trying to get a decent even coating not too concerned about things getting inside the slots those are going to get milled out later anyway maybe not that one so i should probably be careful about the cavity or the yeah the cavity for the electronics but everything else should be okay just a nice even spread my blank's actually flat but it looks like it's rocking a lot because my vise has seen better days the actual surface on it is not very flat anymore so that's why it looks like it's rocking a lot okay we're almost there just make sure i get all the little sections so a lot of this is going to get cut off so it's not super critical on the edges just mostly on this center section okay i'm good there and let's put this over okay yes we have the right side aligned or the correct side get pretty close double check all sides that's looking pretty good although i'm a little i need to come a little bit further that way my center mark is lined up on that side and my center mark is lined up on that side need to come a little bit that way center mark's good okay i think i'm happy with that so we're gonna glue that up i'm gonna take one of these let's bring this whole thing forward a little bit and i'm going to clamp one down just very light pressure to help me hold the alignment i'll do one over here although i don't have much space over here i need to be careful with that one okay i'm just gonna go ahead and put my plates down double check my alignment yes i'm good on that side yes i'm good on that side okay [Music] plate number one is on okay and plate number two okay and plate number three is in a cardboard box still but it's just as heavy okay i'm gonna go ahead and squeeze down on these outside corners make sure i'm bringing the top up to it in case there's a little warpage okay more on this side okay i'm gonna clamp down on that nice and tight until i see maybe a little bit of squeeze out okay i've seen a little bit over here okay getting some over there so that's pretty good got a tiny bit right there again remember i went pretty light on the edges i'm gonna take this off for a second let's see if we can get that last one on maybe maybe not probably not okay so i can shift the weight a little bit more that way to help with that and i have just for good measure two more so that's easily over 100 pounds maybe 150 pounds worth of aluminum sitting on top of that so i'm not happy with that because it looks like my center since the surface isn't particularly flat i'm gonna have to take this one off for a second move that more inward it's where the surface is significantly more flat i don't have okay rely on all that weight see if i can add something else to it you know what i got just the thing a drill press for good measure all right i'll see you guys in a little while all right so we're finally ready to flip the part over so once again i'm going to take a little bit of time just to clean up the fixture make sure any tape or anything we might put down um will stick the way we want it to degrease it get it nice and clean okay that's looking pretty good all right so i've got the blank here so this is the back side and i removed the excess from this side because that would have blocked off my access to my zero point i just hand sawed that off and so we're going to install it like that now i have four dowel pins in there and they do all fit and i'm debating whether or not i should put a little bit of tape right here just to make sure it doesn't lift up i want to learn my lesson from the neck where i really glued this down and i had four dowel pins in which made this really really hard to get off of the fixture so i did check i already installed it once and um there's quite a bit of force holding it on it was quite difficult for me to get it off so i'm thinking i might just put a little dab like right in the middle like a little small piece of tape just to keep it down and that should be easy enough to break or maybe i'll just do it on the side so i can kind of pry under it and remove that so that might be the smarter idea so let me go ahead and grab some tape and i'm just going to put a little bit i'm not even going to cover this whole thing i'm just going to put a little bit to the outside here actually no because what's going to happen is when i finally cut through the body we're going to probably end up removing the stock anyway and so i do need some tape in the middle to go ahead and hold the body down and i could probably just use a couple clamps to hold the excess stock down for now until we remove it so i am going to go ahead and run a strip down the center like so that should be good enough okay and i'm going to run a strip down the middle of the guitar here let me see if i can get this in the camera sorry so i'm going to go ahead and run a strip down the middle here like that just enough to hold the body in place but not enough to make it really difficult to remove so i think that'll be fine and let me grab some super glue and i'm going to tap these in one more time just for good measure to make sure they're all the way in yep sounds like they're all the way in so we're good there okay i'm gonna go ahead and yeah we'll just leave that be okay so right in this area is where we need to have super glue so let's go ahead and do that we're getting pretty low here okay so right here that should be good and to all you naysayers i'm gonna go ahead and run this on with my finger it'll be fine don't worry this stuff doesn't harden very quickly at all okay let me wipe that off and spray this on okay and we're gonna install our blank so we've got the two pins here see if i can get that aligned there we go done that went on just as i had hoped i didn't have to force it on hammer it down or anything which means it's going to be significantly easier to get off i'm just putting a little pressure on here to make sure that holds and then we'll go ahead and get cutting all right parts flipped over it's installed we've got our zeros set i've double checked all my work offsets i am using the correct ones and we're gonna actually go ahead and rough everything out then uh cut the contour before we switch to cutting the neck pocket which i'm going to need the neck for in order to size correctly once that's done we'll go ahead and switch to the ball nose and clean everything up so let's go ahead and do this so i'm going to turn the spindle on and we're gonna run it [Music] [Applause] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] wow well there you have it we have an absolutely incredible body for this guitar and i could not be more happy although i did run into a lot of issues along the way particularly in this control cavity area which you guys saw that i had to open up and also the outer contour i still have a step on the front sections right here but thankfully it's not in any dimensionally critical place so everything that is wrong with this guitar body can be resolved with just a little bit of elbow grease so that is what we're going to be doing so in the next video we are going to go ahead and sand this up to 220 and get rid of all the tool marks and then finally we are going to be setting the neck finally having a completed piece that is going to be ready to go ahead and put finish now the reason why i switched to a set neck because originally i had a bolt-on style was first of all because i was a little worried about the thickness here and using that as a bolt-on but second i want to guarantee that i'm able to get this transition perfectly smooth and flush and so by setting the neck that is going to allow me to do that now unfortunately you're not going to see that video until probably january unfortunately because in the next couple weeks i am moving i'm moving into a new house with a larger garage and it's going to take me a few weeks to do that we're going to be painting and so i'm just not going to have any time to be making videos and then unfortunately right after that we have the holidays and so i'm going to be spending time with family and it's going to be our baby's first christmas and so we're really excited so i just want to say thank you all so much for coming and joining me on this journey and to all of you out there i just want to say merry christmas and if you don't celebrate that happy holidays i wish you all well i will see you in january

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 946

Keywords: Autodesk Fusion 360, CAD, CAD Modeling, CAM, CAM Basics, CNC, CNC Router, DIY, Fusion 360, Fusion 360 Beginner, Fusion 360 CAM Guitars, Fusion 360 Tutorials, Guitars in Fusion 360, Tutorials, fusion 360 tutorial, Autodesk, Sketching basics, Guitar Body, Guitar Neck, Xcarve, Xcarve CNC, Guitars with Xcarve, CNC for Guitars, Project Mehr, Mehr, DIY Guitar, Flat Guitar Neck, Guitar Neck CAM, DIY guitar body, Mahogany guitar body, Walnut guitar body

Id: JJcsHqbWgTc

Length: 44min 24sec (2664 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021