Here is the Tele that Gary built using the drawings on this page.
It looks like he did an excellent build. He is working on
cleaning up the CAM code that I will post here after he sends it to me.
Tele
Style Guitar CAD Drawings
Here are some CAD drawings that I made of a Tele Style
guitar. These parts should interchange with a Tele since the neck
pocket, pickups, and control cutouts are the same but some of the
cosmetic dimensions are slightly different from the original. The
neck has a modified "V" profile.
After several attempts I finally came up with a workable
design for a neck. This neck has the following features:
* Modified "V" profile
* 13 degree head angle
* 25.4" scale length
Here are the SLDPRT, IGS, and STL
files for this neck.
Guitar Repair Class
I saw this ad
on the Baltimore craigslist and decided to give it a try and was very
glad that I did. I took the Advanced class that covered
"all the how-to's regarding how to deal with fret
buzz, fretting, refrets, leveling etc for electric guitar, acoustic
guitar and bass."
* Fret Buzz: Causes and
Solutions * Fret Dressing and Leveling * Fret Crowning and
Re-Crowning * Fret Wire: Different Types
and Uses * How to Complete a Partial
Refret * How to Complete a Full
Refret
The Luthier / Owner Tony Leicht was great and showed the "real way" to
do many of these tasks without buying $$$'s of tools from specialty
Luthier suppliers. I would highly recommend his classes to anyone
interested in guitar repair / building.
After searching for a while for a ready-to-machine neck for a
Tele, I ran across some posts from cyborgcnc in the CNCzone forums about the
subject. Cyborgcnc has created a set of videos for CNC Design
and Machining of guitar necks and bodys. At first I tried to do
this on my own but it was taking a lot longer that I had planned and I
still hadn't come up with a buildable neck. Although I was a bit
skeptical about he cost/benefits, I decided to purchase the CNC Guitar
Neck Design and CNC Guitar Neck Machining videos.
My payment was acknowledged almost immediately and I received
the videos within a few days. The videos show the author
designing a neck in Solidworks and creating the toolpaths in
Mastercam. Every step is shown along with the author talking
about the source for each measurement used and the reasons for each
step. Throughout the videos, he discusses not only how to operate
the software but how he comes up with design ideas, where to buy parts,
and how to realize the design in wood. Basically, these videos
showed exactly how to do what I want. They have saved me many
hours of wading through Solidworks and Mastercam tutorials and figuring
this out on my own. These videos are great -- I can't say enough
good things about them.
It's obvious that a lot of time was put into these videos and they are
definately worth purchasing if you want to learn how to do CNC Design and
Machining of guitar necks and bodys.Since the neck
design videos were so good, I ordered the body design and machining
videos as well. CNC Tele Build After starting a new CNC machine build with Harford
Hackerspace (http://www.harfordhackerspace.org), I began looking for
something cool that we could easily build after we get the new machine
completed. A Telecaster (tm) style guitar seemed to be a pretty
straightforward project that could be done in a weekend.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good 3D or 2D model of a basic design
without paying a significant fee so I have begun coming up with a
design that can be built on a small DIY CNC router. The design
will use standard off-the-shelf parts (electronics, pick guard, control
plate, pickups, etc.) and can use a standard Tele style neck (pocket is
the same size).
So far I have the body modeled using CamBam with registration holes so
that no difficult alignment needs to be done when flipping the body
from the back to the front.
Here is a screenshot of the body
Here are the CamBam and DXF files for the body (what I have so
far). I will be adding the machining operations to the CamBam
file and will post the g-code and instructions to build as I complete
them.
The current routing plan is:
Step 1. Mount blank (16"x13"x1.75" with back up) on the router, drill
registration holes (.25 drill) through the blank and into a sacrificial
board mounted to the table.
Step 2. Drill string holes (.125 drill) and route string ferrule
countersinks (.25 spiral router)
Step 3. Insert dowels into .25" registration holes and flip blank to
front side. The dowels will line up with the holes in the
sacrificial board.
Step 4. Drill neck mounting holes and shallow holes for bridge mount
(.125 drill)
Step 5. Route neck, pickup, and control pockets (.25 spiral router)
Step 6. Use screws to mount body to sacrifical board through neck holes
and string holes. This is needed to the body doesn't move while
routing the outer profile.
Step 7. Route the outer profile (.25" spiral router)
The neck will be considerably more difficult to model so if anyone has
a CamBam, Solidworks, or IGES model of a neck than can be freely used, please email me.
This is a 3D animation of experimental banjo
bridge design 2. This is a joint design by Steve Myers and
myself. Steve has dubbed it the "CockruMyers Bridge".
This is the first acoustic guitar that I built. I built
it when I had just started to play guitar. I was inspired by the
Lynn Dudenbostel episode of Handmade Music on DIY so I bought "Build
Your
Own
Acoustic
Guitar" by Kinkead and used the plans in the
book. The biggest mistake that I made was not using a 2-way truss
rod. The neck developed a bit of a back bow that is difficult to
correct. I have the front and back completed and have the sides
bent for #2. It is a dreadnought sized with a sitka spruce top
and Brazilian Rosewood back and sides. This is Dalbergia Spruceana
and not Dalbergia Nigra -- I'm not sure that I can tell the difference
but it's a lot cheaper and is not CITES restricted.
Here is a video of my CNC
router cutting experimental banjo bridge 1.
This is a 3D animation of experimental banjo bridge design 1.
This is a 3D animation of the stress analysis of experimental banjo
bridge design 1.
Here is a photo of experimental design 1 cut with my CNC router.
This one was made for Steve Myers
This is the jig that I use to
cut the bridge blank to size with the table saw and to cut the taper.
This is an 8.5 degree 5/8"
dovetail bit in the router table that is used in conjunction with the
jig to cut the taper.
Here is the resulting bridge
blank held in a fixture ready to be CNC routed.
