School me on the best machine for big hardwood

**bluesking** · 18-04-2019

Originally Posted by Washout

I don't have any drop/carve tops yet, but do have the design run up for an RG/Super Strat custom design with a carve which I'll be cutting, once I have finally finished my AS Tele project. The strategy I'll be using for that will be similar to the video you linked, but will use Fusion 360's Adaptive (trochoidal) clearing rather than a traditional slot/side milled waterline strategy. The reasons for that are that it vastly reduces tool and machine wear and you can run at very high speeds (with careful tuning) - you can see the strategy at work on that Tele video when its roughing out the front side cavities where I'm running at approx 3,500mm/min on a single flute cutter, but could increase that dramatically using 2, 3 or 4 flute cutters.

The carve will then be "smoothed" out on a finishing pass using a ballnose cutter of 8+mm, which should then only leave light sanding. You can see some of that in the neck cutting videos on my channel.

The "problem child" cuts for guitars are the final cut outs I've found, where unless you have the room for "adaptive clearing" in a gutter around the body shape, you'll be using slot milling, which means reducing the depth of cut, as it tends to brutalise the machine and cutter otherwise. Doesn't mean it won't do it, but it just takes a lot longer than adaptive clearing. Again you can see the slot milling cut near the end of that video to compare feeds and speeds.

Hope that helps.

Thanks Chris,
A little over my head! I'm certainly no CNC expert, my work to date has stopped at the CAD point (using CAM only for inlays and fret slots). I know I'm probably putting the cart before the horse but I need a machine that will be capable of working in a way I understand - I've clearly got a lot of learning ahead of me.

Worst case scenario, if I can at least automate template production I will already be way ahead. My latest design takes me a couple of weeks to manufacture by hand - I'm not expecting it to jump off the CNC ready for finishing: