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Well, I've been making banjo parts on the CNC for a little over a year now. It's been working out really well, and I've learned a lot about CNC, Rhino and MadCAM in the process. Many thanks to the folks on this board as well as over on the CNC forum for the assistance--I don't know how I got by in the pre-Internet days! Anyway, I've built some archtops in the past "the old time way," with lots of elbow grease involved. Tendonitis in my elbow has kept me from doing much of that kind of heavy carving in recent years, so I decided to try it out on the CNC.
I modeled a 17 inch archtop guitar in Rhino and wanted to do a proof of concept on the CNC to make sure that my MadCAM tool paths worked out like I thought they would. For my test top, I scaled the entire model down to tenor uke size--I've always wanted to build an archtop uke. I did my toolpaths in MadCAM, and today I did a couple of test runs on some cheap pine. I'm quite pleased with the results. Once I sand the surfaces down, I'll be darned near right on final thickness. I'll still have final plate tuning, recurve scraping etc. to do, but it's darned good right off the machine. I'll try it in real wood in the next week or so.
On other fronts, I've been making a lot of custom banjo bridges--the CNC sure makes cutting those out a lot easier! Still quite a bit of handwork to get them where I like them, but I've worked up some new designs that let me do a lot of EQ on the tone fairly easily. They've even been selling well, and that's always a good thing! I've also added a 4th axis to my XZero Raptor machine--I hope to be able to do things like tailpieces using MadCAM's 4th axis capabilities.
Anyway, here's a picture of today's experiment. The tap tone is actually pretty good, especially considering it's "shelf wood" status....