Drift

Don't worry Doug - it's comforting to know you had the same problem... I have guitar size neck blanks in Honduran Mahogany plus some made up blanks for sale. I also have a neck carving DVD - takes me about 40 minutes to fully hand carve a neck. This is about how much time it would take to CNC it. Got to Taylor's 'factory Friday' series and you will see that they DON'T use CNC router set-up for neck carving per-se. They use an incredible turret style shaper - much faster. When I visited Hawaii recently, Kamaka had a geat CNC set-up which was 5 axis working on the principle of a lathe to present the work at the various angles to the tools.

Best of luck with it - it will be a pretty much academic exercise with an expensive long reach bull-nose cutter...

Kamaka had a geat CNC set-up which was 5 axis working on the principle of a lathe to present the work at the various angles to the tools.

Best of luck with it - it will be a pretty much academic exercise with an expensive long reach bull-nose cutter...

Interesting. My original plan was to use the fourth axis rotary table to rotate the blank and thus avoid the need for an expensive long reach ball nose cutter 😉 However, MeshCAM didn't seem to handle this processing too well (it only indexes anyway) and because it isn't smart enough to know what it has already cut on a previous index you have to mess around with varying the depths of cut manually.

In the end, it seemed easier to just do a two sided cut. I did indeed waste a lot of money on a 100 mm long, 38 mm flute length 4 flute ball nose cutter then discovered during some smoky trial runs on Khaya offcuts that I should be using two flute cutters for timber anyway and the ball nose cutters are not for roughing.

My latest draft plan involves a two sided cut with a 5 mm 2 flute end mill for roughing on the top (fretboard side) which has a 5 mm rounded bottom truss rod channel then finish with a 5 mm 2 flute ball nose cutter. Maximum cut depth 15 mm.

For the bottom side, roughing with a 6 mm 2 flute end mill then finish with a long series 6 mm 2 flute ball nose cutter to a maximum depth of 24 mm. To reach the full depth (38 mm) on the central rounded section, I think I will just remove the uncut material at the sides of the blank then run a second toolpath with a machining region restricted to this (i.e. avoiding the tenon end and headstock). I think this will work out o.k.

It's all a bit of a faff really but the Brian May neck does not have a uniform C or U profile along it; it evolves towards the tenon whereupon it blends into the rectangular section. Then at the headstock end, there is an enigmatic shaped bump as the fat neck transitions into the lozenge shaped headstock which Gibson Les Paul enthusiasts might refer to as a volute This would be difficult for somebody with no fine woodworking hand-eye co-ordination experience like me.

Perhaps after I have knife and forked my way through one CNC cut, light bulbs will illuminate and I will find more efficient ways of doing it.

Doug

Our inlay below.

Machine not 100% accurate again tho- the left leg of Snowdon is narrower than the right and we now have slightly oblate holes and a 'step' but identifying the problem is proving much harder this time. We only ran it for a few hours too...

Holy cow, your exotic woods leave me jumping mad! Over here if I want to buy a piece of anything they'll only sell me the entire log!!!

Can any UKer or thereabouts provide sources for fine woods in 'modelling quantities' and who'll be willing to sell overseas? Online sales preferably? I'd like to try my hand cutters at doll furniture.