I am thinking about treating myself to a new toy. I don't think I can quite stretch to a CNC router just yet, but might be able to stretch to a laser engraver/cutter in the next few months, all depends how much of my bonus the tax man leaves me.
I still want to build guitars by hand as much as possible, but my eyesight is deteriorating, some things I used to be able to do easily are now a struggle. I'm wondering if this is something that can pick up a lot of the precision work, whilst still doing a lot by hand
The obvious one is making accurate templates, jigs and cutting inlays/logos in various materials. I could also consider using it for many other decorative elements, and possibly even tasks such as marking out of wood with a bit more accuracy than a pencil and my eyesight allows.
I am looking at something like the Atomstack X7 . it's a 40x41cm work area, but extendable to 85x41cm so could work for most guitar sizes and claims to cut up to 15mm. I likely wouldn't push it past 6-8mm for most things I have in mind
Any experiences of these cheaper engravers/cutters? Any ideas what other clever luthiery bits I could use it for?
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In short, if you intend to use it for mainly engraving work, and perhaps making inlays or logos, then I'd say go for it. But for cutting templates etc, I personally don't think they're the right tool for the job.
Air assist is already on the shopping list. Most of the things I have in mind for cutting are 6mm or less, and I am looking at machines that claim to be able to achieve 15-20mm in solid wood
as much as I hate to promote a channel called "guns and guitars", he does have some good vids on this. I posted a template making and engraving one above
Here he claims to do 3/8" maple in one pass - that's with a 10w laser
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My eyesight is worsening too and I've found both of the above help for different tasks.
Although I did do a whole body on my CNC - carved top, cavities, all the mounting screw holes and cutting out the body shape, some of those tasks would have been much quicker/easier with a router, so I'd not bother with CNC'ing the larger cavities or the cut out again.
The accuracy you can achieve with the CNC still amazes me. You can cut to a fraction of a mm. So, great for doing the smaller templates, for inlay work, etc. On my last build, I CNC'd half the string-through holes from the top, then flipped the body over, aligned everything *very* carefully, and drilled the other half from the back. They met up to within 0.5mm (I could get a 2.5mm drill bit straight through the 3mm hole, whereas a 3mm drill bit got stuck half way through).
I'm intending to experiment with inlays (you can cut out both the inlay recess and the inlay itself), and with some different pickup rings, some carving shapes that would be difficult to do by hand.
But my CNC has spent more time working on other household projects rather than guitar building. Unless you're running a production line, it's an expensive option.
Anyone who sees me assess a guitar for setup will notice I still go straight to sighting the neck with my right eye, then have to switch to my left.
I would love to go CNC router, but it's out of range at the moment. I'm also thinking the 2D work for a laser will be a good step along the learning curve to 3D if I do later invest in more CNC stuff.
My initial thoughts for this was just small decorative engraving work from a little machine built for doing wooden spoons and the like, but it's grown a bit since seeing the results others are getting from those mid range machines. That last vid in my initial posts shows some impressive fine line inlay cutting.
I did have a mate do a bit for me about 20 years ago. He managed to turn some paua shell to dust, but he did make some nice engraved headplates and a few templates
A laser would likely get used for a lot of household stuff too, since I found myself making a 3mm ply sword at the last minute yesterday for world book day
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Normaltimes, I use varifocals now - so no obvious 2-lenses in the frame appearance.
I got a hobby CNC before lockdown and it's great but I have recently bought the add-on Laser head which is based on the standard 10-watt LED diode approach rather than Co2. The Led version definitely needs the air assist option to do thicker materials and also be prepared that a lot of online videos are sped up but there are things it does a lot better than the cnc.
I would also say although the hobby cnc is not superfast you can happily leave it unattended and doing work. I feel less comfortable about running the laser without supervision fire risk etc and my friend burnt his garage down with his laser. Also, some type of fume extraction burning wood is probably 1000 times worse for you than saw dust LOL :-)
Ideally, I like having both hence the recent addition
looks like it will be worth the extra to go to 10w laser with air assist and extended size if i do go this way... will have to see how much I have to spend.
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Ours is massive, but it does the work-related stuff (acrylic and PP rapid prototyping and small production runs) perfectly. The two of us who are trained to use it have a small sideline in bespoke gifts etc. I also engrave our band business cards with it!
I only have a small 15W machine, which I use for engraving some products that are made from Beech, and I'd say it would only manage to reliably cut wood up to a couple mm thick. I have also tested it engraving some anodised aluminium, and it done OK at very slow speeds.
Laser diodes seem to have improved massively over the past few years, but they still won't match a CO2 laser.
I'm on the LaserGRBL facebook group, and some of the stuff posted done by laser diode machines is quite impressive.
Atomstack machines do seem well regarded, and is what I'd probably consider if I was in the market for a slightly more powerful machine.
I was looking at the sculpfun s10 yesterday which can be had with extended base and air assist for about the £500 mark... but i wasn't as impressed by the results shown in some videos. The atomstack is a little more, but does seem to give viable results.
I'm not too worried about cutting scratchplate material, but would be happy if it could do templates for that
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The makespace here - in Cambridge https://equipment.makespace.org/ - has a laser. I joined up and went along and it was worth taking the training session to work out that a laser cutter would NOT be useful for me after all. So still I get a local company to laser cut thin mahogany panels for me. They've done some basic laser engraving, too.
I've just spent an hour or two messing around in inkscape and laser grbl to make sure I understand the processes involved.
I managed to do a couple of simple but potentially useful things in that time.
A Fretboard engraving/cutting file, and a couple of pickup templates. I'm sure I will find the mistakes in them at a later date, but I'm gonna keep playing around with the programs and doing my research untill the bonus is paid
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Something I plan on experimenting with if I get one.
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I've been slowly teaching myself how to design more things in Inkscape ready for this.
The first project will be some logo discs cut from woods at about 3mm. Either engraving the logo, cutting it out of contrasting wood, or a mix of both.
I will also try making some 6mm pickup templates, marking out a fretboard and cutting some headstock facings. I have drawn some of each of those ready to go.
It will pay for itself quickly if any of that works out reasonably well
I also did a full design of a Zemaitis style guitar, which can be broken down into the individual components and tweaked as needed, like shown below, This was mainly as an exercise in producing a guitar plan in Inkscape.
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I have ordered:
Sculpfun s30 Pro 10w laser
Extension kit to give 935x400mm work area
2x honeycomb base panels.
That all came to £520
Additional to that I will need Lightburn software to take advantage of the automatic air assist this laser comes with, that is an extra £50 after a 30 day trial.
I will update this thread with successes and failures along the way
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