Months ago, we had a nice even board that we used for a guitar body for a family member. It was a labor of love and turned out so well that we had another family ask if we could cut them out a body too. So the last few shops days have been spent working through how best to surface their piece of maple & ebony. Their glue-up was a present, and was not as even a chunk of wood as you'd hope for. We knew it would take a fair amount of surfacing to get it useable and is going to need some added maple on the back to be thick enough for the guitar, but her we're game to give it a shot.
For our test, we started with a large piece of white oak that we had self-milled many years ago and have had drying in the shop. Knowing it was just for testing purposes, we didn't worry too much about the exact grain direction for the cut. We needed to surface it to an even thickness before cutting it out to confirm the design.
We used Carbide 3D to map out the board size with some over-hang for the surfacing area and shims to level the board as much as possible, then measured each corner to identify the highest point as our starting level and the lowest point to know how much we needed to take off. We've been using a lot of bits from IDC Woodcraft lately so we got their 1.5" surfacing bit ready to go and crossed our fingers. I should probably remind that we are not experts in CNC, still very much newbies, hence the finger crossing. We watch videos, read up on what others recommend or warn about and hope we've understood it correctly, before giving things a try. Check us out on Tik Tok to see some of our "woodshop flops" and other lessons learned.
Luckily this time things worked out pretty well. Technically this wasn't our first time trying to surface a piece of wood. The first time we buried the surfacing bit in a chunk of hard wood, it was not good. After that we have held off for a while, as we knew we needed to do more research to better understand how these bits work. This test went much better. We will still have to do a bit more learning about how Carbide's surfacing tool paths work because in the middle of doing this final job, the start location changed from the right bottom corner to the left... no idea why. I'm sure it's something we are or are not doing, but need to understand how to best run this type of job.
The first surfacing test for the guitar was complete, and went well, so we also went ahead and did a test cut for the guitar design. We found a nice patten on Etsy and setup the job. The design came out as expected, and we're thinking to maybe use the test cut for a future clock design.
We moved on to the actual maple & ebony wood for surfacing. It was a little nerve wracking as this was someone's Christmas present and we didn't want to mess it up. After a few false starts and minor adjustments though, we got it running and finished the surfacing. It looks great! Next will be the glue up for the maple backing and the full cut out. I'll post an update when those are done!
Thanks for following along with me, I'll continue to share what we're doing with our shop and hopefully things of interest for others looking to learn.
Next on my To Do list... making firestarters!
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-Boursaw Creations
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