Good morning to all. I hope that everyone is staying safe and making it through our time of social distancing. I have been using the time to try to learn Fusion 360 to help me in my acoustic guitar building. I have a WorkBee, Black Box Controller, 1/4" Makita trim router as the spindle. This machine has been really great for doing such tasks as bending mold creation, fretboard design/milling, bridge design/milling, inlays, etc. I may post some pics of the last guitar I made for one of my Sons. I used my Workbee to cut out many of the parts, mill the back for epoxy inlays, soundboard/headstock for abalone inlays including cutting the abalone itself. Something that I would really like to do is be able to mill the complete neck. While I know this is commonly done with electric guitars the neck on an acoustic guitar is a whole different thing with the headstock angle, heel assembly, etc. I have been working on modeling a neck and have a design done in Fusion 360. I have been experimenting with tool paths. Something that I knew would likely be necessary is the use of long reach end mills. One of my questions that I'm asking experienced users is do you think using one of these on the Makita is really possible. I'm concerned about flex and thus accuracy of the mill. Right now I have the neck model face down on the fretboard side and milling from the back. This will require end mills with at least a 4" shaft lengthen and I'm expecting a lot of flex. I'm considering trying to mill the neck one side at a time, flipping the stock so that I can user shorter end mills but haven't as yet tried that. To be honest I'm not entirely sure how to proceed on this. Should I try to cut the model down the middle or just limit the depth of cuts during the tool path creation. Either of these options would require the stock to be flipped. I have uploaded one of my Fusion project files and perhaps if you are Fusion user you might look at it and make some recommendations. Thanks in advance! - Mark -
