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A buddy of mine and I hired an 18yr old cad wiz-kid to model us up a set of L5 style plates. Today I rescaled them to make a guitar body octave mandolin and I think they came out really well for a first go. Hopefully I can have one of these strung up in the white by the end of October.

Very cool! I hope you bring it to a SLuG meeting after it's done. Would love to see it.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

Definitely!

Sweet, an archie is getting close to the top of my list.
I will use CNC ( chisel navigated cutting) also.
Looks great, is that the finish off the cutter?

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My memory is so good, sometimes I remember things that never happened.

Looks great, is that the finish off the cutter?[/quote]

No..

I have to give it a light sand with 150 to get the tool marks out.

That is really sweet—very excited to see where this goes.

Cool! Is that spruce?

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Pat

Yup..

Alaska specially woods, 1A. It was like $30.00. I didn’t need something fancy for a prototype

Very Nice!
It looks like a great way to get past a lot of the "grunt work" part of plate carving. Does your program rough out the inside of the plate?
How wide is the O.M. in the lower bout (14")? Will you need to glue on small "wings" or will the binding and purfling cover it?
Not a bad looking top. With a little bit of age the "color" will become less noticable. Was it cut for violas?

Clay,

Yup, it gets rid of the "grunt work". I've got a couple luthier buddies who's hands are broken from hand carving plates for the last 20 years. One of them now buys his plates done on a cnc. The other has his own machine. One of them sells their archtops in the $8-22k range. Folks like Anderson use a pantograph to carve their plates. For me, CNC is a logical progression. Yes, it cuts the inside of the plate also. It starts out upside down on the machine, then it's flipped over. The f-hole are cut using separate vectors. It takes about 2-1/2 hours total to run the part. A 17" top would be more like 3-1/2 hrs.

It's got a 14" LB and a 17-1/2" BL. No on the wings. We had the kid add a 1/2" flat perimeter. The actual instrument edge starts where the recurve and the flat perimeter meet.

Personally I'm not a fan of the "perfect top". Give me some color!!

The top was sold by ASWs as an octave mando top.

Best, M

You know some people think of the "grunt work" as therapeutic. But they're usually the guys that aren't CNC'd up

Very cool!

I completely get that, Dr. V!!

When I was 40 the grunt work was therapeutic, at 60+ my viewpoint has changed.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

I'm 42 and looking to get out of as much grunt work as possible. Steve, I'm either ahead of the game.... or wildly lazy.

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This isn't a paying gig so progress has been a little slow. One thing I like about this family of instruments is that I can string it up in the white and give it a go before installing the bindings etc....

M

Looks very nice.

That’s a pretty impressive “kid” you have working for you. Modeling a top like that is the very highest end of CAD. What’s his name? I can think of a thing or two that I would love to outsource to someone with that much talent.


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Now have him model a cutaway.... The only question then would be Florentine or Venetian?

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

You can count on That Baby to sound GREAT though! Right?

Absolutely! It's a very stiff and light! It was graded for color as is usual practice... Great product!

Here is a link to the 17" size sort for this product. https://alaskawoods.com/shop/sitka-spru ... uce-wedge/
Of coarse every set has it's own look, like most other sorts/boards that we sell. The exception is Master Grade that looks like shiny formica wood.