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I'll add a huge thumnbs up for Fusion360. The Youtube material available is absoolutely amazing and is all you would likely need to get you though the learning curve, but if not just ask on the Autodesk forum and someone or many will walk you through.

And yes, an acoustic neck would have to be one of the most complicated things to you will ever model. Don't make it your first project.

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Allen R. McFarlen
Barron River Guitars & Ukuleles
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Cairns, Australia

A friend of mine has an Axiom pro 6. You could check those out. I think it's a welded steel machine. I know he had some trouble with it early on. The spindle was running backwards, the water pump leaked, and I think tech support was somewhat underwhelming. Andy Birko uses Xzero machines though I'm pretty sure Xzero is toast. If I was to buy another machine it'd be a 24"X 36" CRP Benchtop Pro with their plug and play gear. You are probably looking at $8k for one of those with Vcarve pro 9 and Mack3

Actually it says it's got 65mm or 2.55" of Z. You'd be able to do fretboard slots, inlay, and outside profiles on a pre radiused board. You'd likely be able to do head stocks as long as the router bit can reach out over the front edge of the table by 1-1/2" or better. Rosettes would be no problem. You are going to have to go very slowly to get decent resolution. The frame extrusions are tiny.... What is it using for software. Can you download a demo copy and play with it?

Edit... Bridges would also be possible[/quote]
So basically to do a neck you’d set up the profile and radius for the back of it and have to do a scarf and stacked heel or else you’d need considerably more than 2.55” of z (I’m assuming z is vertical travel)


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I just downloaded fusion360 (wife happens to be an educator)


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I think planning on using the CNC to carve a neck AND THEN glueing a heel stack and scarf jointed headstock is not practical. Not impossible, but probably more complicated and time consuming than just carving the neck by hand.


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Michael, that Benchtop Pro, is the 7" - 9.3" Z-axis going to be enough to do an acoustic neck?

My friend with the Axiom machine is doing acoustic necks on it and it's got a 6" X. I know it's at its absolute limit to do so. You could PM Andy Birko and ask what his machines have for Z.

Just saw this thread and basically agree with everything rlrhett said.

As to making acoustic necks on the machine - that's probably one of the most difficult to process items with the CNC. Not so much the actual cutting, but drawing the thing so it looks nice once it's cut is the challenge. Lots of sweeping blends and so forth.

Z-axis travel is tricky to get your head around so what I did was draw up a simple sketch in CAD to get a hold of what's going on. Perhaps a good project to draw up in Fusion 360 to figure out the answer yourself and learn a bit while you go along.

My machines have a bit over 7" of Z travel and 5.5" under the gantry. A rule of thumb is that you need roughly double the travel of the tallest item you want to machine. If you want a 4" tall heel, you'll need roughly 8" of travel to clear the part when machining. The good thing about CNC is that clearance is clearance. On some steel parts I was making a few months ago I had .004" clearance between the shoulder of an end mill and the part and it's just fine (so long as nothing's moving). If your tool clears the heel by .010", you're fine and you'll always be fine so long as you don't botch some part of the setup or whatever (which happens a lot).

Once you have adequate Z travel, you now have to mount your spindle so that you can utilize all of it. In the early days of the Xzero, I saw a lot of photos of the machine with the Z axis bottom set below the gantry bottom which did nothing but eat up gantry clearance. I had to modify my Z axis so I could get all the clearance under the gantry that I could for taller parts. I even have one fixture that doesn't clear the gantry on one side, I have it set up so that I was able to exploit "design limitations" of the machine to make a fixture that's a few inches taller than the gantry.

But back to the most important part that rlrhett pointed out: If you can't draw it, you can't machine it. Guitars have a lot of 3D surfaces on them which are the most challenging to draw up. Start drawing some stuff in Fusion 360 or whatever package you think you may end up using and see if you can handle it. You can always outsource some of the more complicated stuff if you need to but be prepared to pay between $60 ~ $120/hour for design time.

Sorry for the randomness of the response but I'm feeling somewhat under the weather today. Good Luck!

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http://www.birkonium.com CNC Products for Luthiers
http://banduramaker.blogspot.com

If you are seriously wanting to get into CNC and guitar, I suggest the good old saying:

"Buy once, cry once"

Get bigger than you think you will need, because if it works out, you are gonna end up needing more table space.
I am currently looking for a new CNC because of table restrictions and overall lack of machine rigidity.

If you do decide to deal with Xzero, I suggest against it. You will never actually get the machine.

+1 for fusion 360 and YouTube tutorials.
+1 for CNCRP Benchtop Pro (though I don't personally own one, it is a nicely built machine)

I haven’t given up on cnc


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