The Fretboard | Project Mehr | Guitar Build Log Part 3

hey everybody this is austin and welcome back to my channel in the last video we machined the neck for this guitar but it's desperately missing something we need a fretboard to go with it so that is the plan for today so we're going to start by machining some copper that we can use as fret markers and then we will plane down our raw fretboard stock to a correct thickness on the cnc and then finally we will machine the fretboard and glue in the inlays now i realize that i have not created a cam for fretboards video yet so those of you who would really like to see that don't worry i will get to it i promise but you'll at least get to see my process and join me in turning only a couple dollars worth of copper and a beautiful piece of wenge into what i believe is going to be the show stopper of this build the fretboard let's dig right in all right so here's the material i'm going to be using for the inlays it's a one millimeter copper plate and it's got a film on it that i can peel back like so i filed the corners a little bit and that's what we're gonna be using and uh the the film doesn't really matter what i'm going to be doing is i'm going to be using the blue tape method gluing it down to my waste board and i've generated a little pattern that i'm going to use to go ahead and cut those so let's go ahead and do the tool pass for those we need to cut these first so that way i have them ready um to install once the fretboard's a little partial the way through okay so here's the plan i've created a really basic sketch with a basic stock of my copper and i didn't extrude any of the little inlays or anything i'm just going to use the sketch to generate the tool paths on this stock so i'm going to go ahead and use a tracing operation so 2d trace and then i'm just going to come over and let's select our eighth inch end mill sorry i had that on the other screen there we're going to use our eighth inch end mill and i'm going to do 16 000 rpm and we're going to do a cut cutting feed rate of 40 inches per minute that's that should be fine it'll leave us about one and a quarter thou feed per tooth which should be okay we are cutting metal here so i need to be pretty conservative with my feeds and speeds and my chip my chip loads so i'm okay with the way that is so let's go ahead and do geometry and in this case i'm just going to select all of these major construction lines i'm going to select the little ones in between and we'll just select those and then our heights we don't really need to specify that um it's just going to on tracing toolpaths it expects that you're basically going to be using like a v bit but what we're going to do is we're going to use multiple depths with a axial offset which will allow us to cut down into the stock further using this so i'm just going to do passes and first things first is we're going to set an axial offset so this is actually going to be how deep into this stock are we going to cut so we're going to set a negative value of negative 1.1 millimeter so my stock is one millimeter and i'm going to go point one millimeter below that to ensure that i cut all the way through i don't want to have to file or sand or grind anything like an onion skin away and then we're going to do multiple depths and in this case i'm going to go basically like a 3d printer i'm going to go in 0.2 millimeter layers so 0.2 millimeter and we're going to say a number of step downs so since this is one millimeter that would be five step downs and that should be good let's go ahead and check it real quick i didn't turn off coolant so let's turn that off real quick and hit okay and let's simulate this really quickly so slow this down okay so it's going to cut the perimeter in 0.2 millimeter increments and then it's going to start slicing its way through looks like it's doing it in a little bit of an awkward order but that's okay doesn't matter okay let's speed this up make sure we go all the way through okay that looks good to me and i'm not worried about these parts breaking free because i'm going to use the blue tape and super glue trick i'm going to make sure the whole thing is really slathered on there so that way we'll have a nice adhesion on there and then i can just peel off the tape when we're done so that should be okay so let's go ahead and hit close and let's right click and say post process and i'm going to call this copper inlay and it looks like it reset my output folder for some reason so i'm going to change that to my dropbox so i use a dropbox folder so that way i can send things to my laptop i'm doing this on my desktop right now and so i'm going to go fusion 360 post process guitar and let's do actually go back guitar and hit okay i've got my machine set as x-carve so it'll automatically grab the post processor for me let's go ahead and post that no post processor selected okay and let's do x carve our inventables there we go x carved by inventables select post and we're going to put this in guitar yep copper inlay got it okay now i'll see you guys over at the cnc and we'll go ahead and cut this okay so i'm gonna lay down a couple strips of tape doing my best to get them as lined up as possible i'm just gonna cut it right on the front board here so we're going to do right there like so and we'll do another one i'm going to try to not overlap these so i don't introduce any error we'll just try to get those lined up as best we can like so that should be good okay i'm gonna do one more i don't even need them this much but i'm just gonna do it anyway there we go okay so that's gonna be our foundation that we're gonna be putting the copper inlays on and i'm i think i'm going to go ahead and peel one side of this so like so we'll leave the other side on top and we're going to place it roughly right there so let's go ahead and do that that should be good okay let me grab my super glue okay and we're gonna place it over top of this main section right here looks like i need to unclog this hole it's dried up a little bit on me i'll be right back okay so we're going to put some super glue right here like so and i'm gonna make sure that's really nice and slathered around there so i get the whole surface area okay and let's wipe that off and i'm just gonna spray or tape the other side of this real quick so okay and then what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna spray on here like so okay and we're gonna i'm gonna spray shake this up a little bit i don't think i got much on there there we go okay and then we're gonna set this down roughly parallel to my boards here it doesn't have to be perfect because we have a little bit of an offset and i'm just going to press it down give it just uh probably 20 15 20 seconds or so and that should hold it down for me okay so let me go ahead and upload the new program we have all of our zeros set um i'm gonna go ahead and start the spindle and we're gonna run this at 16 000 rpm and if i need to speed it up we totally can so i'm going to turn this on [Music] that seems to be a happy medium right there i might scoot it out just a little bit [Music] [Music] so what we're going to do is i've got a sheet of 320 sandpaper on my trimming plate which is just a sheet of glass and we're just going to sand these real lightly to remove some of those burrs and clean up that surface which will also help scuff the copper so that way we have some kind of surface for the epoxy that i'm going to use or super glue to grip to and then i can just kind of clean up these edges just real lightly um copper sand super easily so i'm not worried about that at all about getting it nice and square or anything like that just clean them up a little bit so here let's see we have one right here that's got quite a little bit of film on it so let's do that one we'll just stuff that real quick that's already peeling off do the other side [Music] yeah there we go okay and we'll do the edges just very gently try to keep it 90 if i can okay so as you can see oh we need to do a little bit more on that one not much just a little bit there we go yeah i'm sanding the whole surface now so that's good okay so i don't know if this is going to come out on camera or not but you can see we've just got like a lightly brushed finish on there that's all i'm aiming for it only took you know 30 seconds per i've got 20 of these to do so i will see you guys back in a minute all right so we've got these scuffed up and ready for epoxy so now we can just go ahead and move on to cutting the fretboard okay so here's the fretboard material it's one gay it's a really nice dark piece with a lot of figure in it i don't know how well that's coming off on camera let me see if i can zoom in here so you can see it a little better really beautiful figuring on it so i really think this is going to make a sick fretboard one downside though is right now it has a both a bow and a twist in it so i need to actually flatten this material out so that way i can cut the fretboard now thankfully i knew this ahead of time and i went ahead and bought a nice thick piece so it's a half inch thick piece of wenge material and you can see i've both got a cup and a if i twist it this way i've got a little bit of a twist in there so i'm going to show you guys my surfacing process which basically what i do is i clamp it up to a straight edge so let's say i clamp it to this fixture and i squeeze it this way and what i'll do is i'll grab like a little block right here let me uh bring that over i'll grab a block like that and i'll clamp in from this direction and just hold it there and then that way i can just cut it flat now i'm not trying to push it down or anything i'm treating this like a joint i'm treating my router like a jointer right i don't want to push down on it i just want to squeeze it from the side however it currently is establish one flat surface then flip it over and make sure that is pressed down onto the cnc clamped up and then i can go ahead and cut the second surface so that way i get two parallel surfaces to each other and the thickness that i'm aiming for is i'm going to reduce this down to about .27 inches so i'm going to go 20 thou above my limit so that way i don't have to do any facing operations once it's on here and what we're going to end up doing is i'm actually just going to since i've got the fixture here i'm going to go ahead and continue to use my work offset that i did for the neck and i'm just going to tape it in right in place where it would be and one cool thing about that and this is kind of a tool and die machinist trick is if you know that your cnc has some areas that dip a little bit i know for example that my cnc tends to drift downward just slightly the further back i go on the cnc and so what's really nice is by cutting this in the exact same spot on the cnc and including the same fixture i most i give myself the best chance possible to get a fretboard that is accurate to the piece that it was cut to the neck that it belongs to let's say and so if i cut it right here then i know and i use the same work offsets i did on my neck that i give myself the best chance for success so let's go ahead and do that okay so let's tighten these up there we go okay and then apply some clamp pressure you don't need a ton here i'm just trying to keep it nice and secure that should be good okay so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna measure this this is 24 inches by three inches so instead of going through the process in cam of coming up with a tool path and a stock and everything like that for a facing operation i'm just going to write a very simple g-code file where i'm going to zero off my work offset here and off this surface and then i'll just go like you know 25 inches that way half an inch over you know 25 inches back half an inch over and repeating until i get across the entire surface and then all i have to do then is just lower my z but and then re lower my z the depth that i want to take the next cut on re-zero my z and then run the same program over and over until i get exactly the thickness i want so let me go ahead and do that and i'll be right back okay so i'm going to write a very custom very simple g-code file to do a facing operation here so that way i don't have to go model anything i don't already have in fusion so what i'm going to do is i'm going to start with g91 incremental and basically what that means is i'm not going to reference any of my home positions on my cnc so i will still set my x y 0 but the program won't actually use those it's just going to move in the direction that i tell it and the point of this is if i use g90 let's say and i start from my home position what if i what i did was if i sent it to y25 and then let's say i move over x 0.1 and then i go y back to zero well the next time i do this i have to move to x point two and then each time i'd go like y 25 x point three y zero and the problem with that is i can't really copy and paste that without having to go back and edit every one of those x of those x values so instead i just want all of my x values to be 0.1 so i'm going to move over 0.1 inches every time i reach the destination that i'm looking for so what we're going to do is we're going to do g91 incremental and we're going to go y 25 from wherever i tell it to start and we're going to do that in a feed rate of 80 inches per minute and then we're going to do x 0.1 and now instead of going to y 0 i'm just going to go y negative 25. so effectively what we're doing is we're moving it up and y by 25 inches to the right by x and then we're going back backwards by another 25 inches and so then i can say x point one again and so that means i've moved point two inches in so let's do this again real quick and that way we can develop our pattern that we can just copy and paste so i'm going to go y 25 x point 1 y negative 25 x 0.1 and so this is a repeating pattern here that i can copy and paste until i reach the the depth or not the depth the width of my fretboard that i want so we've moved 0.2 and here we've moved up to 0.4 so every time i paste this i'm going to move another 0.2 inches so now we're at point eight point one or not point one one inch and now i can go one point two one point four one point six one point eight two inches and now i can do it again and go two point two point 2.4 2.6 2.8 3 inches so i established a repeating pattern of traveling up y by 25 inches over by 0.1 and back by 25 inches and over 0.1 until i reach 3 inches wide and so that will work for me so let's just go ahead and save this so i'm just going to hit save and let's save it to our post processor file and we're going to name this fretboard facing dot nc and that way it'll make it an nc file and go ahead and hit save and now we can go over to our cnc and run it so let's do that okay so i'm going to go ahead and move my z down [Music] all right let's travel down and i'm gonna zero it on this inside face here and just run it right there and i might move it in just a just a hair so that way we make sure we cover the entire thing so let's go over and i'm just going to touch off like i always do so let's go in smaller increments now okay we're almost there let me just see if we can feel it scrubbing i'm not gonna use a flashlight in this time just gonna go until i feel it scrubbing i don't need to be accurate here okay there we go we are perfectly scrubbing it so that's good so that's going to be our x0 for now and let's go ahead and jog this out there we go and then i'm going to zero it to let's just move it within an inch of our machine here so right there and we'll make that y zero okay and now i'm just going to zero my z to the top of the fretboard and then all i have to do then is just come back move my z down to the depth i want and then run the program so i'm going to send my z up a little bit move it in and let's go ahead and zero this so let's go [Music] okay we're almost there just gonna go until i feel it scrub i'm just going in one pound increments here there we go okay it's just starting to scrub so that is going to be my zero just for now as a reference point and then let's go ahead and move it c up move it back a little bit get it out of the way and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna send this to z negative 0.0625 so i'm just going to go ahead and take a 16th of an inch off the top of this and we'll see if we get it nice and flat what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn on my spindle send my z down to z zero and then run the program so we're gonna go ahead and do that so turn on [Music] [Music] okay i just realized why it's moving so quickly and that's because in my code i forgot to type uh i forgot to type g1 so it's doing a full g0 rapid right now which is why it seems so insanely fast so we're going to go back to g or f 80 but we're going to make it a g1 move command that way we don't get those in same speeds and this is far more controlled so let's go ahead and cut because right now we're cutting in a full g0 rapid which isn't good so let's go to z0 we're already there so let's move that up to a safe height actually no let's go back to z zero we're gonna set another point zero sixty five so z negative point zero six five and we're going to set that as our new z 0. we're going to jog it up to our safe height go back to x0 y0 much better that's more the speed i was looking for okay so our target is 0.27 and we are currently sitting at 0.289 i'm just going to double check that again point two eight eight five so basically yeah point two eight nine so that means we're nineteen thou above our target which means i'm just gonna take about fifteen thou more out i don't want to go below 0.27 but it's okay if it's a little bit higher so we're going to take 15 out of the top of this and then we're going to be done and then we can move on to actually gluing it on to our fixture and then go ahead and start cutting it so we should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.27 maybe a little bit over okay just cleaning up a little bit make sure we don't get any error in our measurement so we're gonna check this and i will check this properly once we take it off 0.275 let me try that again 0.273 [Music] 0.273 yeah point basically we're within three thousand point two seven so i am totally happy with that so let's go ahead and let's take this off and let's go ahead and set up to cut the fretboard so we're gonna do just like that so i'm gonna clean off my fixture real quick grab some paper towels actually use a little bit of alcohol just to make sure everything is nice and clean and so the tape can stick to it really well make sure there's no leftover tape residue or anything from previous operations okay that's looking pretty good so let's grab our tape let's taper down i'm gonna go right right down the center here like so i'm just gonna tape all the way down there we go okay and let's avoid our problems from the last video where we put the wrong orientation down so we're going to tape on this side and cut on this side so let's go ahead and do that right down the middle like so okay i'm gonna burnish this a little bit just to make sure that we don't kick it off for any reason do this as well i should have done this on the neck but i had the dowel pins holding it in so you know what on that note let's remove the dowel pins make sure we don't end up accidentally running into it i think i can just leave those ones in they're pretty far away so i'm fine with that i'm gonna choke up on this tool quite a bit because i want as much rigidity in this tool as possible these are really tiny i mean really tiny fragile little end mills it's kind of hard to focus on on the camera but what i'm going to do is i'm going to make sure to put the end mill in as far as i can um safely and still giving myself clearance so that way i give myself the best chance of not breaking these so let's go in there we go okay and let's go ahead and tighten her up okay that should be good plenty strong enough don't need to crank down on these little tools in fact if you crank down too much you might introduce an accuracy [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so off one on the fretboard is done so we were able to cut the inlay slots with that tiny one millimeter end mill i was so worried about breaking that end mill and i just must have nailed my feeds and speeds because it cut like butter it just went right through the wood no problem no tear out really or anything and the sound of the machine was great so i loved the way that cut then i switched over to the roughing pass and i went ahead and roughed all of that out now in the cam what i thought i was going to do was install the inlays first and then do that and in hindsight i was right and i should have done that what i ended up doing after exporting those tool paths was going ahead and doing the roughing past first so that way i could just have you maybe a tiny little bit of stick out on the inlays and just clean that up in the finishing pass that we're about to do well that turned out to be a bad choice because my inlays now stick out more than an eighth of an inch and that means i'm going to have to either come cut each one individually like a really tiny little tool path or i'm just going to need to wait to do these until the end but if i do that then it's going to take a while to sand them down flush and i'd like my machine to be able to do it for me so i kind of have to make a choice here do i want to maybe file those inlays down to a smaller size maybe get my da sander or something and you know grind them down do i want to risk it install the inlays and then use my cnc to cut them even though they're kind of sticking out of the slot and it's going to chatter a lot or do i want to just finish the rest of the fretboard install the inlays and then file and sand them down afterwards when they're glued in i'm not sure [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right well there you have it we have a finished fretboard that is ready to be glued up to the neck and man i could not be happier with the way this turned out both in the way the copper just kind of bounces off of the fretboard but also in the figure because originally i intended to use one of the front faces for the front side of this but as i machined that down when i was facing it i actually realized there was a lot more figure hidden in the middle of the wood and that's what you ended up seeing here so i am just thrilled with the way this turned out and i actually got a little lucky because i learned my lesson from the previous video where i used a significantly smaller step over i used a ten thousand step over with a flat end mill instead of a ball nose end mill on here and that gave me this nearly satin almost burnished sheen to this and so this is actually ready for probably 320 grit or 400 grit sandpaper and then it's going to be done and so that's actually we're going to be doing next week is we're going to be gluing it to this neck and then we're going to sand all the surfaces up and get rid of all the tool marks from last week and get this ready for finish and then we're going to be installing the frets so don't miss that video but until then i will see you guys this is austin signing out

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 873

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, Variable Chamfer, Variable Fillet, Guitar Body, Guitar Neck, Xcarve, Guitars with Xcarve, CNC for Guitars, Project Mehr, Mehr, DIY Guitar, DIY Guitar Neck, Flat Guitar Neck, Guitar Neck CAM, CNC fretboard, Fretboard inlays, wenge fretboard, cnc inlays

Id: 1lbPS71TFik

Length: 41min 45sec (2505 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021