Hoytbasses
02-02-2013, 10:25 AM
Greetings.
I'm probably your newest rookie. I teach guitar building and woodworking at Nauset REgional High School on Cape Cod. The desktop machine should be here next week and I'm very excited.
over the last 13 years we have built from scratch somewhere around 500 electric guitars and 200+ acoustic guitars so I'm no rookie in teaching even special needs kids how to build an instrument from scratch. Personally I've bult hundreds of instruments from basses, electic uprights, jazz boxes, acoustic guitars, banjos.... etc.....all the old school way.
I am a complete rookie at CNC however, so I'm hoping that this forum will help me to not re-invent the wheel.
so now we will be introducing CAD/Cam into the mix. I've been fooling around with the supplied Vcarve software and am very pleased in how easy it is to learn to use and the toolpath program is way easier than I envisioned.
It doesn't appear that the drawing program in Vcarve will work well for designing guitars/guitar parts. so it looks like I'll probably have to invest in Aspire?
on the electric guitar side, my plans are to have the kids design their shapes with paper and pencil and transfer that (via JPEG?) to a design program. They'd pick out pickup and bridge configurations, and probably choose from some pre-designed control cavity designs. They'll do the tool-pathing and cut out the body/add all the pockets and cavities. From there we'll use conventional routers and hand tools to do stuff like the belly bowl and arm ramps and radiusing the body. With the necks I'm envisioning having them cut out the blanks/headstocks and use the BOt to hog off most of the neck shaft radius but the final neck carving will be done with hand tools. While we currently do tilt-back scarve joint headstocks, I'll probably do flat Fender -style necks while we get accustomed to the CNC.....
so that's my VERY long introduction. I'm hoping others have already forged some of these trails and can help me to get on the right path in both learning the software and then teaching it to students.
thanks
Karl Hoyt
I'm probably your newest rookie. I teach guitar building and woodworking at Nauset REgional High School on Cape Cod. The desktop machine should be here next week and I'm very excited.
over the last 13 years we have built from scratch somewhere around 500 electric guitars and 200+ acoustic guitars so I'm no rookie in teaching even special needs kids how to build an instrument from scratch. Personally I've bult hundreds of instruments from basses, electic uprights, jazz boxes, acoustic guitars, banjos.... etc.....all the old school way.
I am a complete rookie at CNC however, so I'm hoping that this forum will help me to not re-invent the wheel.
so now we will be introducing CAD/Cam into the mix. I've been fooling around with the supplied Vcarve software and am very pleased in how easy it is to learn to use and the toolpath program is way easier than I envisioned.
It doesn't appear that the drawing program in Vcarve will work well for designing guitars/guitar parts. so it looks like I'll probably have to invest in Aspire?
on the electric guitar side, my plans are to have the kids design their shapes with paper and pencil and transfer that (via JPEG?) to a design program. They'd pick out pickup and bridge configurations, and probably choose from some pre-designed control cavity designs. They'll do the tool-pathing and cut out the body/add all the pockets and cavities. From there we'll use conventional routers and hand tools to do stuff like the belly bowl and arm ramps and radiusing the body. With the necks I'm envisioning having them cut out the blanks/headstocks and use the BOt to hog off most of the neck shaft radius but the final neck carving will be done with hand tools. While we currently do tilt-back scarve joint headstocks, I'll probably do flat Fender -style necks while we get accustomed to the CNC.....
so that's my VERY long introduction. I'm hoping others have already forged some of these trails and can help me to get on the right path in both learning the software and then teaching it to students.
thanks
Karl Hoyt