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Its rather weighty, hence the chamber. It may also get some Swiss cheese holes in other areas under the top.
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http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/89942/caspercaster#latest
It will be used for:
Templates (cutting, i'm purposely going for a template heavy design with the inset top)
Marking out body (engraving)
Marking our fretboard (engrave fret slots, outline and additional decoration. possibly cutting it out too)
Making the inset top (cutting out and engraving additional decoration)
This is all stuff I know it will do now, but it requires me to think about my build process a bit differently. I'm going to do all the routing and fitting of the inset top before cutting out the body the usual way
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Not massively figured, but I don't want anything OTT as it will feature some other decoration.
The outline is just drawn on for now to check positioning, I might flip it the other way
It's about 4mm thick, so easy to cut with the laser
I'm going to try to keep the pickup cutouts to make bobbin toppers for some homebrew P90s.
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Cutting went great. Engraving needs to be sealed filled and levelled off. Also I changed my mind on bridge before cutting and didn't reposition the decoration.
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It's a pretty good fit.
I won't glue that on yet, will carry on working on the body first
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"If it smells like shit...It is probably shit"
I went a bit fast and used an offset fill setting rather than the usual fill setting, which is more thorough but a lot slower
I think it's still workable even if I have to re paint in some of the lines at a later stage... or sand them off entirely and re-engrave at a slower speed.
I think I'm going to colour the middle of the maple, maybe just leaving the outer ring and pickups natural
The laser does cut the maple really well at these thicknesses.
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Complete with matching wood backplates
I suppose I should start making a neck
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the templates for back plate routes are slightly larger than the plates themselves. The top is a friction fit, the back plates are purposely loose to allow for finish
The next laser job will likely be the fretboard
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Just interested to compare with my CNC experience.
The templates took about 2 hours to cut, going slow with extra passes to ensure they cut as cleanly as possible. Obviously a few hours designing and tweaking too.
I did use the laser to engrave the body blank with the various templates and center line, which made alignment much easier. that was a quick engrave job so only took 5 minutes
Routing was fairly quick because all the templates were ready to go and the body was well marked out, about an hour and a half even with the tricky recess. That includes pre-drilling the cavities
The maple bits have been done solely with the laser. it cuts really well so took about 40 minutes to cut and engrave it, but I think it would have benefitted from slowing down the engraving step to make it a little deeper
It's probably not much faster than making all those templates by hand, but it is a hell of a lot more accurate and obviously repeatable
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I have used the laser to engrave fretslots and outline, as well as routing out some inlay slots.
This took about 25 minutes all in. The laser did a good job on the rosewood so the fretslots and outline are engraved 2mm deep, inlay routes are 3.5mm deep.
I suppose I could cut accurate thickness fret slots, but for now I am just using it to give a good deeply scribed line for the fret saw. I think I could have easily cut the whole thing out too.
I went with a 24.5" scale and 24 frets. Mainly to do something I don't have a slotting jig for.
I then spent a few minutes cutting some maple bits from the top offcut to fill those slots.
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The issue with reclaimed wood... it has a big mahogany dowel on it and I have no idea how deep it goes
I wasn't lucky, its still there when rough cut, but only just, and doesn't go all the way through. I need to re do the headplate anyway so will go with a slightly shorter headstock design
Which gets us here
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I'm wondering whether the sweet spot might be to use the CNC to cut the first few mm of the cavity, enough to then get a bearing guided router cutter in there to do the rest. That'd save the time of making and affixing the templates (and space of storing them all!).
Same experience as you re the fine/detailed work though - CNC is great for repeatedly cutting really accurate pieces and all the intricate stuff that you'd struggle (or worry) trying to do freehand with a router type tool.
Is it a glitch or me
There's another discussion (I think in the Help & Feedback) section re photo visibility issues.
Should of gone to specsavers lol