curtisa

Probably this. Treat it a bit like you're making an Airfix kit plane component that is still attached to the sprues. You're creating the body out of a solid slab of timber, so whatever is left behind after doing the full perimeter of the body will still be the full thickness of the thickest part of the body contours and flat. I'd leave the body attached to the outer block using 6-10 tabs and drive some bolts through the blank (outside of the milling area and away from any potential collissions from the cutter) into your spoil board. Mill everything from one side and do the perimeter to half the depth of the body thickness, unbolt it and flip it over and do all the operations on the other side. To 'release' the body from the slab just zip through the remaining tabs on the bandsaw and clean up the leftovers by hand using whatever technique works best for you. If you place your bolt holes at precise locations that are a mirror image of each other you can even flip it over and only have to line it up once, as the body will end up equally aligned whether the front or the back is facing upwards. Tilted which way?

While he might be able to tune his guitar, he might struggle to tuna fish.

Look at this way. At least you didn't attempt to mill a bunch of fret slots, break every single one on first attempt, write a strongly-worded letter to your local newspaper about the lack of quality manufacturing in your area, appear in an interview on 60 Minutes about 'the nightmare neighbours from hell', and have to explain to the police why you're running around the streets wearing nothing more than a hot water bottle and brandishing a pool cue while yelling 'HERETIC! HERETIC!'. By my reckoning I'd say catastrophe has been averted

Couldn't see endmills on his ebay page. You sure they weren't his 0.223" drills?: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/10-0223-MICRO-CARBIDE-DRILLS-from-Kyocera-Microtools-NEW-OVERSTOCK-SALE/151844971038?hash=item235aaa621e:g:qpQAAOxyhs9RCFkf

Welcome to the dark side.

No, you don't have to.

New motor = $100 - $150 plus whatever time and modifications you need to do to make it work if it's not a drop-in replacement. New bandsaw = $400 upwards Secondhand motor or bandsaw = $??? Specs on the bandsaw in question: https://www.harborfreight.com/14-in-4-speed-woodworking-band-saw-60564.html It appears to have multiple speed options. Have you tried sawing at lower blade speeds (lower cut rate but more grunt)? Motor specs in the manual are a bit vague, but indicate 7A at 120V which is about 1HP. Should be mountains of power to cut through walnut, particulalry with the 4 speed reduction belt drive that this bandsaw appears to come with. I'm thinking the issue is one of setup rather than lack of power.

OK, how about this: The capacitor value will be very dependent on the surrounding circuitry. Caps are cheap. If I were you I'd just buy a handful of different values ranging from 0.001uF to 0.047uF and try them in the guitar until you find one that sounds right to your ears.

The only difference between the Gibson 50s/modern wiring variants is how the tone circuit is connected to the volume pot. In the 50s style the tone circuit is attached to the toggle switch/wiper (outgoing) side of the volume pot. On the modern wiring the tone circuit is attached to the pickup/hot (incoming) side of the volume pot. Adapting for the Telecaster where the relative positions of the toggle switch and pickups are different to a Les Paul, something like this should do it: Yes. I was more highlighting that the diagram by itself does not give the full details about the wiring scheme and that it shouldn't be used to as-is when constructing the circuit.

What are you classing as '50s' and 'modern' defiitions of the Telecaster wiring scheme? Do you mean these two variants? There's something very wrong with the way that diagram has been presented. There aren't enough solder tabs drawn on the Megaswitch, and nearly all of them are shown bridged together which would be completely incorrect. The Schaller product page for the Megaswitch has more detail regarding what the wiring scheme actually should be.

'C is for cookie, that's good enough for me...'

I've been searching for that <Sarc Lock> key for years... And yes, a tough decision this month but a well-deserved win @komodo

Not if the controller uses USB. LinuxCNC doesn't support USB connectivity. Essentially you'll be using Mach 3/4 if the controller hardware supplied with the CNC requires it. If the hardware comes as a GRBL variant you can use any number of open-source/free sofware to control the CNC. The listing for the 6040 doesn't explicitly state what the interfacing software requirements are, so if you choose to go for that one you'll just have to take a punt and deal with whatever it arrives with. Beyond that, you could always gut the control box and retrofit whatever control interface takes your fancy. The 3018 and WhittleCNC both indicate GRBL is the control method. The 3040 looks like it's Mach 3 only. Based on the similarity between the 3040 and 6040, it's quite likely that it'll be Mach 3 for the 6040 too. No real drawback having it. You can always not use it or even bother plugging it in. It's just an extra cost on top of a basic 3 axis machine that likely will not get much use when making a guitar. And if you do decide you have a project that warrants its use, the software requirements to create milling code to take advantage of the 4th axis become trickier to fulfil if you want to keep things open source/free. Think of it as a bit like a lathe, but instead of endlessly spinning the workpiece around you now have the ability to rotate the work around incrementally and stop/start anywhere you like. In conjunction with the regular 3-axis range of movements, you could then do some advanced 3D carving, like milling out a statue's head from a single block of wood; something that would otherwise be impossible to do on a regular lathe or a normal 3-axis CNC. For the most part, yes. CAD software = design your part, create a 3D model (your pickup template, scratchplate template, PCB layout etc) CAM software = accepts the model/drawing created in CAD and works out how to remove material from the blank chunk of wood/plastic/MDF/cheese to realise the part you've just designed. Spits out the necessary commands that can be sent to the CNC as a string of semi-humanoid textual commands (G-code). Control software = takes the G-code file from the CAM software and feeds it to the machine line by line. The CNC then does exactly what it's told to do and gives you a great big pile of dust and (hopefully) the part you wanted. Generally this bit is proprietary - Mach cannot talk to GRBL hardware, LinuxCNC cannot talk to Mach hardware through USB, GRBL cannot talk to anything with a parallel port etc Software like Fusion 360, Rhino and FreeCAD integrate items 1 and 2 within the same package. Sometimes the CAD and CAM is separated and the design/3D model must be passed down the chain so that each bit of software can do its magic on it. Item 3 is invariably a standalone bit of software. I don't know of anything that integrates the whole chain in one application.

I didn't realise until recently that the song 'Blue Powder' on Vai's Passion and Warfare album was initially recorded as a demonstration piece for the Carvin X100B. Guitar Player magazine used to have those removable vinyl records you could tear out of the magazine and play back on a tuntable, and it appeared on one of those in something like 1985 or '86. When Vai released P&W in 1990, he just remixed the original recording and stuck it on the album. Pretty cool to think that such a wild song was actually much older than the album it appeared on

That's a pretty big step up from what you were considering earlier. Do you need the 4th rotary axis? I suppose you could use one to carve the back of a neck, but it's not a mandatory requirement and adds a lot more complexity to the mix (and an extra chunk of cash too). The recent changes to the personal-use version of Fusion 360 removes 4th axis support, so unless you want to pay for an additional subsciption to F360 you'd have to hunt for a different CAM software solution to use it. The spindle will work fine for direct hardwood cutting, but that's taking things well beyond your initial scope of just doing PCBs and templates (if you can directly cut the wood, why would you make a template?). It's also a watercooled spindle, so you'd need to allow for a small pump, a sealed bucket of water and the hoses in your workshop. Like the 3040 you looked at earlier, it's not clear what the interface is designed to work with. If it's GRBL there's plenty of free/low cost options to go with. If it's Mach you'll need to add the price of a license. As @MiKro suggests, 500 lines of code won't take you very far. Not trying to push you away from the 6040. It's definitely a machine that would fit 90% of applications you'd encounter building a guitar (save for perhaps a neck-through instrument, a bass neck or really large body shapes), but there's no doubt that it's positioned as an advanced-beginner item. I never found that with mine, but I never expected my unit to be churning out parts on an industrial scale either. It worked for what it was expected to do just fine. Oh, and on the Fusion 360 changes again - the other thing Autodesk removed from the free version was rapid motions, limiting the fastest travel to the cutting speed. Cutting feedrate when the tool is engaged in the material might be 800mm per minute, but your rapid feedrate when the cutter is retracted from the work is defined by whatever limit you impose on your machine, which could be thousands of mm/min. On a small machine that's not going to translate to any real issue when in use. On a larger machine, if you need to quickly and frequently traverse across a long distance in between cutting motions (say, carving the back of a neck) that's going to add up to a significant chunk of extra time.

Good enough for late-80s Steve Vai

Ah, yes. I was thinking of splitting the body template up the centreline and orienting each long edge up the Y axis. But yes, you're right - nothing stopping you swinging the whole thing around by 90 degrees and using the longest axis of travel to cover the widest part of the body and doing a 1+1 arrangement instead. I wrote an article about the process some time ago describing how it can be done: Part 1 and Part 2. Edit: ...whoops, and Part 3 as well.

By itself it won't be big enough to do most larger templates in one go, although with some careful planning you could do some 2x2 layouts and join all four quarters up to make a singular full size template of say, a body. I used to slot fretboards on the 3020 in two halves. Fiddly but do-able.

The first one is basically the next size up from the unit I got started with, a CNC3020. I see at the bottom of the listing they even show the CNC3020 as still being for available. The controller looks like it's been upgraded and has dropped the parallel port interface that mine came with for USB instead. It's not clear what the control interface actually is, but like the other two units you list it could be a derivative of GRBL/Arduino (plenty of open-source software options) and if so it should just plug-and-play from an interfacing perspective. But otherwise it looks the same as my old machine, just bigger. The second unit is slightly different in that the gantry is fixed and the table moves underneath it to give the required Y-axis travel, as opposed to the CNC3040 and WhittleCNC where the table is fixed and the gantry moves over it. It makes the overall footprint bigger than the equivalent-sized moving gantry unit, but if its been designed properly it should be more rigid. I doubt that translates to anything meaningful though, as it's very much a light duty machine and you won't be milling metal or taking massive cuts on the 3018. The spindle motor is tiny, so any work you put it to will need to be done on the slow or taking very small nibbles - OK for PCBs and shallow engraving jobs, but expect really long work times for half-inch MDF templates. There's tons of reviews and demos on Youtube for the 3018, so evidently it's got quite a strong following. I'd probably steer clear of the WhittleCNC. The ability to lower the table to give more potential work clearance is nice, but the whole thing is a very open-to-the-elements design. You're forever going to be cleaning it just to keep it running smoothly and reliably. The spindle motor seems to be some kind of handheld flexishaft engraver? Direct-drive belts and plastic frame mean its really only meant to be used for the bedroom hobbyist. If it were me I'd go for the CNC3040, if only because it's the one I'm familiar with. Beyond that there are other things about it which float my boat - the spindle is bigger (you'll run it on maximum speed for all your jobs anyway) and will take more abuse, the construction has a lot more mass to it which translates to being able to cope with bigger workloads, the inherent design shields the moving components reasonably well from dust and chips. If nothing else the bigger working area should sway you towards it. You might only foreshadow making up PCBs and pickup cavity routing templates, but I can guarantee there will come a time in the future when you need to cut a custom Strat pickguard and it will not fit no matter how you position it. If you're quite sure you don't need to go as big and are looking to save a few bucks, you can always shoot for the 3020 (which is also a more on-par comparison to the WhittleCNC and 3018 you linked to in terms of physical dimensions anyway).

Still, I reckon the potential for a pretty nasty friction burn, abrading the outer layer of skin from your palms or a pinch where the drum meets the forward lip of the opening would be enough to make me want to engineer some additional safety tweaks into the basic idea of the Sand-flee. Some kind of self-retracting cover perhaps? Another thing that might be worth considering is limiting the maximum depth of cut so that the workpiece doesn't get ejected straight back towards you if it catches while you're feeding it

I had seen the Sand-flee some time back and always thought it would be impossible to get a flat surface out of the finished timber passing over the exposed drum. The two halves of the table are not at slightly different heights like you'd see on a jointer - the infeed table being lower than the cutting head is what defines how much wood is removed, but the outfeed table being at the same height as the apex of the rotating cutter is what is used to define how flat the cut is. The easy improvement to the Sand-flee would be to make the table in two halves to set the heights appropriately and remove the risk of sanding in divots or a wavy surface. Not sure how I'd feel running something over the table held by the flat of my hand with a drum of sandpaper whizzing away underneath at a couple of thousand RPM either.

Have you wired it up to try it out? If the 5-way switch is the one I think it is you're going to have the first issue I mentioned, whereby the neck-in-parallel position plus coil tap engaged will give you no output.

I was actually just watching that video - the stars must have aligned There was a white paper written some time ago by an application engineer at SBE Electronics (which used to be Sprague, who made the orange drops) regarding this very topic. The crux of their explanation was that the manufacturing processes at SBE/Sprague could never distinguish the outer foil location of their caps, and the black line is not an indicator of the outermost layer location. He doesn't go into exactly what the black line was used to signify which perhaps muddies the waters a bit, but anyway... Further, the theory that the outer layer must be grounded, or at least connected to the side of the circuit that has the lower impedance, starts to fall apart when you consider what the impedance of that capacitor is in the context of the circuit around it. 10uF at 60Hz is an impedance of about 260 ohms, which is significantly smaller than the resistance of, say the parallel cathode biasing resistor of a tube stage or the input impedance of the next stage of an opamp (I'm assuming the intended application of your caps in the X100B a bit here). The impedance of the cap is so low at frequencies of interest that the potential for coupling external noise is practically identical irrespective of which way around it is installed in the circuit. Long story short, the implication was to not worry too much about trying to determine a correct way to install the capacitor with regards to the outermost foil layer.

Interesting. What's your thinking with regards to doing this kind of testing for bipolar capacitors?

For absolute beginners with plenty of community support it's probably hard to go past the X-Carve or Shapeoko, but both systems have belt-driven axes. That's not to say you couldn't do guitar work with them; there are plenty of examples out there by people who have used both systems to do just that. The Shapeoko looks more solid than the X-Carve, but I don't know if looks translates into anything meaningful in reality when comparing the two. The X-Carve claims to be more hackable than any other, so there's an option there to upgrade components as you go along (and there are also numerous examples of people who have done so). But there are software and hardware choices that have been made by both companies in the interest of keeping the technology accessible to everyone that would personally make me shy away from them. If you're not afraid to get involved with the technical side of things, Probotix seem to make some pretty robust-looking systems. Even the numerous examples on eBay from China are an option, but be warned that at this level the machines are not plug-and-play solutions and the learning curve is much steeper.