curtisa

There's lots of good advice here to help you achieve the desired result. But you haven't actually said why you want the neck lowered deeper into the guitar body. The photo of the string action over the fretboard in your first post doesn't actually look that bad - certainly lowering the neck deeper into the body will make the action even higher, which is probably not what you want to achieve. If you're wanting lower action (ie, the strings closer to the neck) can you not lower the bridge to achieve the same thing?

Does it need to be dried at all? If all youre trying to do is let the wood acclimatise to your work area normally you'd just set the wood aside in a flat state and let it sit for a few weeks. Fans, dehumidifier and racks seems a bit overkill.

Repairs. They're a consistent source of income, at least compared to exclusively locking yourself into making instruments. Successful and ongoing employment from making instruments is only viable for a vanishingly-small fraction of the workforce. As to how you 'get into it', I'd have to say you need to demonstrate that you are good at it. You need to be able to convince someone with a faulty guitar, or person with a guitar that needs something modified, or a person that has a desire to have a custom instrument built that you have the experience and abilities to execute the work to their satisfaction. That could be word of mouth, a portfolio of work, a reputation you've built up over time. You will need to acquire many skills that can only be obtained through training. Some things may help speed up the process though - being practical with your hands is good, being creative, being determined, having good interpersonal skills. Conversely you need to be prepared to be able to recover from a bad experience too - that repair may not go right, the one-off instrument may not turn out the way the customer hoped. Being as young as you are I'd say absorb what you can from your school years early; get good at maths, engineering and other 'relevant' practical subjects - woodworking, machine shop, graphic design. Later on maybe approach local music shops or professional luthiers and find out if they have any traineeships going that you can apply for in instrument repair. In your spare time get your hands dirty and be interactive with the guitar - pull it apart, put it back together, repair it, modify it, learn what all the adjustments do and how they interact with each other, set up your instruments, work with your friends to adjust/repair/modify their instruments as well. Arguably your 'informal' training you exposes yourself to in your spare time through experimentation will be just as important as any formal training you receive from a mentor or instructor.

What does the seller say about their products? Are they being sold to you as dried and ready to use or undried? Adding additional drying time to the timber may not be a bad thing, as it allows the wood to become somewhat acclimated to the environment where you're going to work with it. But your question is better directed to the seller of the timber.

If it's a career in luthiery you want to pursue I'd recommend you start making inroads now. Most people here are doing this on a hobbyist basis and it is not their primary source of income; their day jobs subsidise their hobby. A (very) small number of members here make guitars professionally and as a means to eke out a living from it. It's a long road up from absolute beginner to a full time successful job, and it covers a lot of varied and different skillsets - design, mathematics, electronics, fine woodworking, mechanics, tool maintenance, finishing. Not forgetting the business side of things as well. One thing I would say after watching the PRS factory tour on Youtube, is that there appear to be a lot of workers in the factory that only do a handful of key tasks - a guy that does truss rod installation, someone to fret the neck, another person responsible for running the CNC machine, someone whose job it is to glue and clamp bodies. It's a production line, so while there may be some nostalgia in wanting to work at a guitar factory, you should also be prepared to do some pretty repetitive and menial tasks, particularly as a junior employee. Maybe they rotate some of the guys around different tasks, but I'd be very suprised if any of the people on the shop floor will be personally responsible for making a guitar from start to finish. Does PRS offer some kind of apprenticeship or traineeship program? Maybe make some enquiries along those lines. Bear in mind that as particular people in the factory appear to do one or two key tasks, they more than likely were trained in an associated industry before coming to work at PRS - the person who works the spray booth was probably trained in the automotive repair trade, the CNC person probably did an apprenticeship at a machine shop.

Sounds like you've taken things as far as you can with the sanding. Have you tried buffing the finish with some kind of compound or paste cream to see what happens if you go for that last step? There are all sorts of buffing compounds that can be bought at a local automotive outlet that will polish a clear finish to give it that liquid glass effect (Meguiars and Autoglym products are a couple of popular ones).

Heavy, man Seriously though - how heavy?

Good call on the dust boost for the CNC. I can't live without mine. Right up there with a LED light ring underneath the spindle to illuminate the cutting area. I vote for option D - rough it in on the bandsaw (or even hand saw it) and finesse it by hand using a plane and/or sanding block. If your headstock angle jig isn't the right tool for that particular neck and your tablesaw only able to cut it under borderline conditions, it's going to take you longer to CAD up a fancy one-off model, work out the toolpaths and machine it on the CNC. Pick your fights.

18mm thickness isn't an issue. Just make the neck pocket a little shallower to compensate. A standard (if there is such a thing) neck blank thickness is 19mm. Your bigger issue will be the width of the blanks. 58mm won't be wide enough to create the headstocks unless you glue extra pieces either side to make up the required width. The other alternative is to buy some separate pieces wide enough for making headstocks with and just use your blanks solely for the neck portion below the scarf joint.

No picture attached to your post. I think most advice you'll see regarding nut slotting is largely identical - that the slots should be deep enough to keep the string captive, that the slot should be shaped such that it minimises any pinching of the string, and that the slot should have a degree of backwards angle or tapering to minimise any sharp angles as the string changes trajectory from the fret board to the tuners. Erlewine's and Frudua's advice will differ only in their preference for fine tuning. I would point out that the Frudua video is demonstrating some pretty advanced nut shaping that would likely take years of practice to master. His breakdown of how much the string should be exposed when in the slot will only be valid for one gauge of strings and is unlikely to be accurately executed with any degree of confidence. It's also less about how deep the slot should be, and rather how much excess you should takes off the top of the nut. It's not clear what the problem is you're having. Is the issue that your nut is too low that the open strings are buzzing in multiple places, or are your fretted notes buzzing in multiple places? Changing the nut won't affect the latter

Small Bear Electronics would have most, if not all of those. Look up the 16mm Alpha potentiometer range. 250K blend pot with centre detent is a bit unusual. Stewmac sell a 250K Alpha blend pot but there's no indication that it has the centre detent. Mind you, if you're building an active preamp there are ways to do blending that don't require the use of such a hard-to-find component Are you sure you need 250K pots for an active installation? Seems a bit on the high side.

Take smaller bites by using less of the cutting flute length and taking more passes. Remove as much excess by other means (cut closer to the outline on the bandsaw, shave waste off using a rasp) before you tackle it with the router. For problem areas where the routing direction starts to work against the grain flip the body over and use a bit with the bearing on the top and rout 'downhill' instead.

How's this? The push-pull switch block is drawn off to one side for clarity, but would be physically installed on the rear of the volume pot.

Maybe 'taut' isn't the right word, but they're definitely under some tension as they're fed through the moulds (it's called 'pultrusion' after all - the strands get pulled through the resin casting process). It'd be an interesting experiment to try at the very least - form a 4' long beam of epoxy and carbon fibre strands and compare it to a premade carbon fibre beam of the same length and cross sectional area. If they have equal performance when attempting to bend them in the same fashion as they'd undergo inside a neck, then you have your answer

Yep - I understand how the rods are made, but the key thing that (to my feeble mind) makes the difference is that the strands of carbon fibre are pulled taut as they are fed through the resin casting process. Bruce's method lays a few strands loosely into the channel and burys them in epoxy. For all I know his method does exactly what he claims it does, but I have questions regarding the effectiveness of it compared to just spending a few bucks extra per build in raw materials and buying a rod. But they are designed to flex without breaking. Doesn't that imply that the marrying of the (relatively) loose wrapping of carbon fibre weave and epoxy allows some degree of compliance in the tube?

Dunno. Would the epoxy/carbon mix gain any more strength if the material being impregnated into the channel was something else just as pliable? Cotton rope? Nylon? Horse hair? I'm not suggesting the process doesn't add stiffness to a neck, but I'm doubtful that two epoxied-in carbon fibre strand/channels would be more effective than epoxying in a couple of 6mm premade carbon fibre bars either side of the trussrod. The example that Bruce demonstrates in the linked thread only has the fibre laid about two thirds the length of the neck, directly underneath the trussrod. Is it stiffer than the amount of timber he removed to make room for the carbon fibre strands and epoxy? Probably. Is it improving things in a measurable way? I'm not sure. The skeptic in me wants to say that with the amount of carbon fibre and epoxy he's added to that neck the trussrod is still doing 95% of the work in keeping it stable.

Don't the carbon fibre strands need to be held under tension while the epoxy sets in order to gain the required strength? I'm not sure you can just lay the fibre strands in the slot, pour epoxy over it and end up with stiffened rod.

The link I mentioned *is* the Bridge Doctor, As far as I'm aware JLD are the only makers of it (although it's not a particularly complex device. I'm sure it could be DIY'ed by just about anyone). FWIW, I'm not suggesting that steaming/heating isn't performed by some in order to flatten a warped top, but it appears to be less common than resetting the neck. For whatever reason the more common approach appears to be to steam the neck off, re-shape the heel attachment faces and re-attach the neck. That may be for the reasons that I listed, could be others, I don't know. Another possibility is that the braces themselves may have also deformed along with the top, and getting them to re-flatten at the same rate as the top when steamed/heated might be akin to pulling on a loose thread in your knitted jumper. Maybe because the repair itself tends to be expensive and only economical on particularly valuable instruments, it makes sense to play with the fragile parts of the guitar as little as possible and attack the problem on a part of the guitar that can withstand more invasive work. Dunno...

I get the impression that the repair doesn't normally involve attempts at steaming/reforming the top - softening of the timbers due to steam/heat may make the area prone to simply re-deforming again as soon as string tension is reapplied, loosening of braces may make the repair harder to execute than it needs to be, a significant refinish would be required once complete. I can see why a reset of the neck, while a pretty drastic procedure, has become the 'traditional' method to correct the issue, and perhaps a good reason for the Youtuber, above, to propose an alternative method that is less invasive. JLD make a device that is designed to combat a warped soundboard due to bridge rotation. Mixed reports of its effectiveness though.

I'm going to err towards the other side and say approach his method with caution. He mentions that the reason that his method of performing a neck reset works is that the area where the fretboard overhangs the body near the soundhole has sunken causing the neck to tilt forward and raising the string action, and that his method restores the original shape of this area of the soundboard thus tilting the neck back the way it originally was. In all the acoustic guitars I've seen that could have done with a neck reset the problem was not that the neck had collapsed forward near the soundhole, but that the area around the bridge had deformed and twisted the bridge upwards. Resetting the neck angle using his method under these circumstances just adds another deformation to the soundboard in a different location. It might correct the issue of high string action due to the gradual misalignment of the neck and bridge caused by string tension, but it's doing it in a way that adds more distortion to the layout of the various components of the guitar.

Not using Mach so not familiar with it. Just noticed in the screen shots how much of a mess the GUI looks. Text that doesn't line up, different sized fonts inside buttons, graphical components that don't line up properly.... I know Mach is considered the go-to for motion control on the Windows platform, but the look of it leaves a lot to be desired. More than anything I was checking there wasn't some personal work involved in the way it looked on your part before I started heaping shite on it

On a side note, is that a custom GUI for Mach 3?

Should be OK provided you don't accidentally move the axes by hand whilst changing the bit. Does Mach 3 have a function to do a soft power off? Might also be called 'driver enable/disable'? That'd be less obtrusive than powering the whole machine off. Your E-stop button is there for emergency purposes, and if configured correctly should do an uncontrolled/urgent shutdown of the machine. This is different to a manual stop where the motion controller will pay attention to any deceleration parameters of the motors and spindle when the stop command is given. In that circumstance the software still knows exactly where the machine is because everything has been brought to a halt under its own control. On the other hand E-stop grinds things to halt as quick as possible and to hell with positioning (it's an emergency, right?). In more complete E-stop installations it'd also cut power to the machine. I'd fully expect to have to do a complete rehoming and zeroing of the CNC if I slapped the E-stop while it was in motion, but I'd have confidence I could restart the job and get trace the exact same path if I did a manual stop midway through.

Correct. Provided you do it all in one sitting and don't allow the PC or CNC to go through any form of reset, potentially you only need to zero once. The trouble with machining a pocket like that, if you leave the body mounted flat on the bed, is that the back wall of the pocket leans forward and overhangs the bottom corner where it meets the floor of the cavity. It's physically impossible to mill a 89 degree wall with a cutter that can only be held at 90 degrees. While it is possible to machine the floor of the neck pocket with a software-introduced 1 degree fall, the final finish won't be perfect as the end of the cutter, being at a less than perpendicular angle, will leave little 'half moon' divots as it travels around. The base of the cavity will only be an approximation of the true flat surface you've modeled. The only way around it is to either tilt the cutter (which is impossible with your machine), tilt the workpiece or somehow disguise the gap that will be introduced at the top of the cavity and live/deal with the poor surface finish on the bottom face of the cavity.

You'd still get two bolts on the centreline - one in front of the neck pocket and one underneath the tail. You could probably sneak two either side of the waist as well that would sit on a straight line perpendicular to the centre. That'd get your bolt locations on a mirror-able cruciform shape. Your starting point can be wherever you like, as long as the cutter will move within the intended confines of your blank, hit everything it should and miss everything it shouldn't. If you've nominated the centre of the model to be the centre of the block of wood (say +Y takes you towards the neck, -Y towards the bridge, +X to the bass side, -X to the treble, +Z upwards away from the face of the guitar, -Z plunging into the body), you'd guide the cutter to that point in Mach3, zero all your axes and hit the 'go' button. The only caveat I'd suggest being aware of is that any operation you need to do that involves removing and repositioning the work needs to allow for your starting point to be repeatable. If you do something that deletes your starting point (say, cutting your pickup cavity removes any pencil mark you place to be the reference point of the milling operation) you're going to have a hard time trying to line it up again to do any further cuts. That also goes for flipping the body over to mill the front and back, which was why I suggested adding drill holes at known locations. Tricky. Your only solution to those scenarios may be to place the body on something that has the tilt built in to it just for those one or two operations.