I don't use a 4th axis for any guitar parts. There's no speed advantage unless it's a very rigid rotary, and a rotary axis like that off the shelf will cost you more than your machine. An arbitrary** neck can be done faster than any of the factories with one face-down and one on-side fixture in a 3-axis machine. A 4th axis is a cool thing to have though, and the ability to carve rings in the round might help patch things over with the missus if you spend too much time with the machine.

**I say arbitrary neck because some of the factories use 'cheat' necks which are purpose designed to be cut with form tools

I've had 4 different emails into K2 without a single response, so I'm not impressed with them.

I contacted Brett at Blurry Customs about this machine and he's been so very helpful and informative. Getting a shipping quote now and we'll see how this pans out. The best part of it is the wife is on board.

I don't use a 4th axis for any guitar parts. There's no speed advantage unless it's a very rigid rotary, and a rotary axis like that off the shelf will cost you more than your machine. An arbitrary** neck can be done faster than any of the factories with one face-down and one on-side fixture in a 3-axis machine. A 4th axis is a cool thing to have though, and the ability to carve rings in the round might help patch things over with the missus if you spend too much time with the machine.

**I say arbitrary neck because some of the factories use 'cheat' necks which are purpose designed to be cut with form tools

Hi Allen,
Have you seen this machine? http://www.cnclinear.com/ i only came across it recently and looks to be fairly solid.
They also seem to offer some training materials on drawing, programming etc if you needed it.

Cheers
Glenn

Has anyone seen a real blurrycustoms machine by the way? It always worries me a bit when little shops only post renderings of their product.

Bob, I'm not sure what you mean by an arbitrary neck being able to be cut faster than the factories...but as I'm sure you know, you can carve a neck in about 5 minutes with a Fadal and a good jig. You could also use a custom tool as Bob suggests, but I think the quality of the carve might suffer(?).

Trev

Not that I know of. Spiro (CyborgCNC) posted in another thread about their stuff and I believe is at least acquainted with the owner on some level. Given how easy it is to whip something impressive up in Solidworks in an afternoon, I wouldn't be looking at any machine without a userbase or a lot of cutting videos and a guarantee unless I could go see it myself.



Arbitrary just means you can pick a neck, any neck, rather than just necks with a perfect C back carve for example. A form tool will leave a better finish than a ball, but designing for form tools puts limits on your geometry. The 'new' Seagull neck Godin is making is an extreme case of this: it's designed to be cut with a couple custom shaper cutters in a matter of seconds. Form tool just means the tool is the same shape as the part, so molding cutters and rosette cutters are a good example of common form tools.

As an aside on machining times: In metalworking, we have finishes to define what really got done in a length of time (ie: in 10 minutes with a 64 Ra finish), but in woodworking it's sort of open. One of the factories I visited 'could CNC a neck in 7 minutes', by which they meant they could get a chainsaw-quality finish on it in seven minutes. Taylor gets it ready for finish sanding in 7 minutes or so on the machine, but they also use a shaper to do the roughing and cut some headstock details outside the machine. It'd be interesting to see the total time each factory takes between 'block of mahogany' and 'ready for 400 grit' as well as the proportion of that time spent in the CNC.