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Hi, I have been a woodworker my whole life but have never built a guitar nor do I play one or any other instrument for that matter. My son is a jaz saxophonist with a Masters in Saxophone performance and mentioned he might want a guitar so I want to build one for him. I have a CNC router to do most of the wood cutting on. I use Fusion360 for CAD and CAM.
What I need from all of you is:
Are their CNC plans for an electric Jaz guitar if there is such a thing?
What hardware is needed? He mentioned Humbucker pickups.
I seriously know nothing about this but I can surely follow plans and instructions. I don't want to build one from a kit.
Any help you could provide would be deeply appreciated.
Thanks

Can't you just press the on switch and a completed guitar pops out?

if a complete guitar based on my current knowledge popped out it likely would not work.

Bruce, first for every new builder I highly recommend Melvyn Hiscock's book Make Your Own Electric Guitar. He is due to publish a new one but many many guitars have been built from the current one. It will explain everything about how guitars work and how to make one, only doing it the old fashion way with hand and power tools.

Second, I can't be much help with the cnc side of things. I come from that world in industry, I was a CAD design engineer in a manufacturing plant for most of my career, but my attempts at lutherie are all about hand building. However I do follow the CNC threads when they pop up on various forums. There happens to be a CNC subforum on OLF here if you scroll down the main page. Also there are several builders at the TDPRI forum who use CNC - I can point you to some of them.

I think there are some CAD designs floating around the internet - some for free, some for sale. As you know there are really three steps to making that work - you need the design in some sort of 3D modeling software (SolidWorks, Fusion), then you need to calculate the tool paths for your particular router or mill.

Here are a couple of random CNC builds from the other forum'

https://www.tdpri.com/threads/press-a-b ... st-9311489

https://www.tdpri.com/threads/first-cnc ... e.1019657/

https://www.tdpri.com/threads/my-first- ... ed.906551/

and this is rather daunting

https://www.tdpri.com/threads/press-a-b ... st-9311489

Good luck, have fun, post some pictures

edit to add, here is the CNC forum

viewforum.php?f=10106

There is no source for ready to go g-code to make a guitar, at least that I know of. There are some very good YouTube tutorials on creating 3D models in Fusion 360 that you can then develop your own tool paths from depending on the capabilities of your CNC machine. But you will still be mostly on your own.

Even so, a guitar is a complex system of parts. Some of which are suited to being made by CNC and some not. Whether you use the CNC or other tools, you will first need to know what a guitar is (from a woodworking point of view) and how one is made.

Finally, there are very big differences between instruments called guitars. Any guitar can be used for jazz, but the most often identified with jazz is a hollow bodied archtop. It is arguably also the most difficult to build. A telecaster style solid guitar is possibly the simplest to make and benefits the most from a tool like a CNC, but is that what your son wants?

In short, this is a great hobby and CNC is a powerful tool to bring to it. But just like you can’t just get CNC files to make a Federalist tall boy armoire, there is no CNC file to spit out a guitar. I recommend the Hiscock book and watching several YouTube build videos to get a sense of what is involved in building a guitar and how a CNC machine could help.


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great info. Keep it coming.

my son mentioned something like a semi-hollow body guitar? Does that make sense?

one more thing. What is TDPRI?

Here is a young man who made a semi while in quarantine (no CNC). Nothing fancy, basic construction, but nicely filmed. It will give you some idea of the tools used and skills involved:

https://youtu.be/jXdKAwHSe6M


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"Semi-hollow body" guitars means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. To me it means a guitar with some sort of solid block in the middle to support bridge and pickups, and a hollow area in the sides and maybe lower bout. Examples might include Gibson ES-335 style guitars or maybe some of the chambered things. The top might be flat or arched, the sides might be carved out of a block of wood or bent and laminated. They could be almost any size and shape. I have built several that might fall into this category, but the best thing would be for your son to point to a guitar and say "build me this one"



TDPRI is a forum dedicated mainly to Fender telecaster guitars but they have a fairly active building subforum that covers all sorts. OLF (here) kind of frowns on "build threads" and is mostly oriented towards acoustic builders (I do both) so you will not see a whole lot of electric guitar activity. There are several people there who are experimenting with home cnc's which is why I linked to that forum.

I would guess that if you joined and posted a question something like you did here you would get a lot more answers from folks trying to come to grips with CNC.

As I mentioned before, I come from a CAD/CAM industrial background but do not use cnc in my guitar building. I am aware of some of the issues however - a big one with trying to mill bodies is having enough Z to do whatever cavities and to shape the top. It seems like CNC is best suited for complicated guitar shapes with arched tops and all (I can build a flat topped guitar in a matter of minutes with a band saw and router) - yet if you are going to put all that time into the model you should build a bunch of them.

I always thought that if CNC were ever to enter my shop the first thing I would make are fretboards - they are a hassle to set up by hand and I change scale lengths and radii so much that a parametric model would just be perfect. Input a couple of parameters and bingo - the perfect fretboard for that guitar. Unfortunately I can buy the same thing for 30 bucks so what is the point?

The other things I would have a CNC do for me is make acoustic bridges (again, a pain), inlay my pearl initials (its an art I haven't mastered) and finally, rough shape necks (but again, they are all different. If I wanted to go into production, then carved bodies would be next.

I don't want to discourage you but I think there are two parts to your question - how do I build a guitar? How do I build a guitar with my CNC? Neither has a simple answer

dude in the vid has some skills.

Yeah, he does. His description says it's his "third guitar". And yet, you can see he uses a lot of purpose built jigs and is playing with a full woodworking shop. He also knows a lot of woodworking tricks that I definitely didn't know when I was his age. I'm not exactly sure where he got the knowledge to make this guitar. I usually can see when these YouTubers are following one of the well known lutherie books, but there is no one book that does this guitar exactly like he does it. Not that there is any huge mystery, it's just that usually people build dozens of guitars before they find the techniques and jigs that work for them.

You can see that you might be able to do the plate carving on a CNC machine, and perhaps shape the neck. The rest of the build, and you can see that it is a lot, would not involve a CNC at all. Even with the plate carving and neck, both would be very advanced CNC tooling involving two sided milling, extensive jigs, indexing, and hold downs. I use my CNC for that, but for a one-off it would definitely be faster and easier to do by hand. The challenge of using the CNC kept the hobby challenging and exciting for me. After a couple of dozen builds, the challenge of building and using a CNC kept it fresh; but for most people I couldn't imagine it being an effective tool.

There is a YouTuber called "Two Cherries Instruments" who has a long multi-part series on making a simpler style solid body guitar using his CNC extensively. A warning though, you will probably want to watch with the volume off. I've never heard such a pointless painful to listen to word salad of nonsense from his voice over. But he is detailed on how he designs and cuts. Also, you can check out "Audiohotshot". He also goes into excruciating detail on how he uses his CNC to mill solid bodied electric guitars.

Good luck!

I was reading an interview with the great archtop builder, John Monteleone, in a old issue of American Lutherie. He said that when he added the cnc to his shop the first thing he had it do was the basic hogging of wood off the top, but he still did all the finish shaping and voicing by hand. The video is a carved topped guitar, not a true archtop, but it more or less what is going on around minute 2.

OK more lingo. What is "voicing"?

Voicing is the mysterious process that acoustic guitar builders (either flat top or arch tops) go thru to try to make the various part of the guitar sound as good as they can. A good builder works with the thickness and density and stiffness of her wood to try to get some sort of optimum vibration pattern or sound. Every luthier has a way to do this, you learn it by flexing and tapping lots of pieces of wood and building lots of guitars.

Electric guitar builders don't worry about this stuff.

OK so I am building an electric so one ore thing to not worry about but your reply is very much appreciated.