Guitar

My friend, Don, offered me a chance to make a guitar for him. I'm no luthier, so rather than start from scratch, he bought a kit. He liked the pattern on my pentaflake tabletop and asked that I do something similar on the guitar body and head stock. The two big challenges were making sure the pattern didn't cut into any of the existing holes in the body, and shimming it up on the CNC machine. 

To position the pattern correctly on the body, I printed it on clear acetate on multiple sheets, and taped them together big enough to cover the entire body, then traced around the body and the holes. Then, I went back into the file and deleted all the pentagons outside the body and around the holes, giving plenty of clearance.

Due to the thickness of the guitar body, I shimmed it up the near the bottom of the Maslow. I used a tiny 1/16-inch router bit to cut the pattern. By this time, I had enough experience with the machine that the cut went smoothly. There were some small variations in the depth of cut due to Z-axis slop, but it wasn't critical.

I finished it with a deep red stain and spray laquer. I did not like doing the finish - I was inexperienced, didn't like going back and forth to put a new coat on every 40 minutes (or something, I can't remember, I just recall setting a timer, going back into the house, then back out to the shop a whole bunch of times), and I should have been more diligent about sanding between coats. Don liked it, and that's what matters. Like I said, I'm no luthier, so Don finished it up, getting some help from another friend who was.