Home Made CNC Router Cutting Guitar, Pt.1: Pickup Cavities and Neck Pocket

In this video my home-made CNC is cutting the pickup cavities and neck pocket for a Charvel-style 3-TITE style guitar body.

Wood of cloice is alder. Not shown is the previous operation, where I surface planed the face down 1/16", though you can see the lip where the face was surfaced.

I'm using a 1/2" 2-flute straight bit. Inadverantly, the feedrate was set to 100ipm at .32" cut depth. Somewhere in the middle of the program I slow it down to about 80ipm. I used 100ipm for the surfacing, and forgot to change it in VCarve Pro!

The cut still came out well, but I was nervous since I didn't have a 1/2" shank bit to do this with! One on the way...

For information on my CNC build check here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBm4LWCNMF4

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• diy
• cnc
• home
• made
• homemade
• router
• Solsylva
• VCarve
• Mach3
• charvel
• guitar

[conrad2001]

you're going to kill that router. Use a spiral bit, and don't cut so deep all at once. You can hear the spindle rattling :(

[AtienzaLouie]

@conrad2001 I normally, but didn't here. I also had the feedrate override at 130% from the surfacing operation, so I had the spindle speed too slow as well for the bit. I normally use a single flute mortise compression spiral, and can actually run faster.

Before this CNC this router was on a a router table with a router lift and IncraJig fence for about 4 years, of continuous use. And it's been on this machine for over a year, running jobs that sometimes took over 12 hours to complete.

[AtienzaLouie]

@AtienzaLouie And some of those jobs were in aluminum!

[subhumanproduction]

you build this CNC machine by yourselves using infos from solsylva.com right? how much the overall cost to build this machine?

[AtienzaLouie]

@subhumanproduction Not exactly. I built my first machine with Solsylva plans, then after a year used the Solsylva machine to build this, with surplus rails I found online. I'd say I have abotu $1200 invested...

[AtienzaLouie]

Thanks! I will good luck with yours!

[alexis221woodworks]

WoW!!!!!  Looka great!!!! I'm in the middle of building my cnc router. Check out my vids...Great!!!

[AtienzaLouie]

I had the spindle speed down because I was using a 1" bit bvefore to plane down the surface... OOPS!