I'm gonna try to dry heat the bend area and slowly bend it down til it matches the body. I don't want to steam it because it'll discolor the wood and I worry the titebond original joint will come unglued.

I'll make a start on a 2nd if I'm waiting on parts or waiting on finish curing but as soon as is possible I'll go back to the 1st and get it done and dusted.

I am really wanting to do the Taylor electric single-bolt neck. I may not be able to do it properly on this body shape due to the exposed neck in the lower access cutout area but that just means I'll need to build another some other time.

I have too many open project files and not enough bandwidth to keep 'em all moving forward at once, unfortunately.

I forgot to seal the inside of the chamber for moisture, though. 🙂 

I am going to set up the body on the mill at work and straighten the neck pocket out. Once it's back square, if it's too oversize then I'll glue in the shims to get the sides back down to size, and then it's time to figure out the important part...

Do I want F-holes in this? Do I want to open up a a channel below the bridge, unifying both weight-reduction cavities?

Will the big empty plus the redwood top and an F-hole be extra cool, or just more faffing about with things I'm not good enough at to make really look great?

My first instincts here are no, just get the body straight, get the neck pocket correct, and be satisfied with the 27.25" scale and three pickups being weird enough.

(also I found my buffer and compound so I can finally finish the Tenor Scale Uke I started nearly two years ago!)

It's still thicker than I want, but it's pretty soft too so I'll have to find a way to protect it. And it needs to flex and glue down to the body, where the arm-carve is cut in. Damn the torpedos, I am going forward!

The top is cut oversized by about 10mm, and I think if I sand the top back to 6mm, it will get me halfway to the needed flexibility to get the top glued on fully.

Now, you've noticed I haven't stuck with the Dynasonic pickups...let my guitar instructor convince me it wouldn't really matter, and to go with something easy to obtain and work with. So, the pickups have turned out to be a pair of humbuckers and a single Danelectro-style Lipstick in the middle. I used a "lipstick pickup in a Strat" bracket to mount the lipstick pickup from the top, instead of drilling through the body.

We'll see how things progress this week. I'm loving the look so far, but the neck pocket damage is concerning. I had hoped to do a Taylor-style single-bolt neck attachment but that's now completely out of the question, as I can't very well continue to enlarge the neck pocket.

I can glue in some shims on each side to bring the neck pocket back down to 2 1/8" but it still really irritates me that the toolpath generated did not match the simulated toolpath. Last time I ever allow that software to produce g-code for me...

Turns out, the software will not allow a full finishing cut unless you choose 3D Adaptive, which is not anything like any other 3d toolpath that I'm familiar with..OK, so maybe that's just how woodworking stuff does its thing.

Watching the CNC do it's thing, I'm impressed by the initial roughing cuts, nice surface finish for a rough toolpath, everything's looking good. Then, the finish toolpath absolutely trashes all the vertical walls on the part, the neck pocket (that was specifically excluded from the finish toolpath!) is now 1/16" oversize and the vertical walls are notched irregularly.

To say I was unhappy is a bit of an understatement, but here we are.

I ran the program again, on a leftover pine stair tread that was pulled from the trash. Same results, but the pine body has some big knot holes and screw holes.

That wasn't the only issue, either, as the Z-Zero setting is a bit screwy compared to the normal way of doing it on the CNC's I use in my shop, and that bit me in the butt too. Nothing super serious but the collet ended up coming into contact with the work at 18,000RPM and left a burn mark over about a 5" section, but it sanded out fine.

I also did a lot of work on the routing template, then immediately slapped myself and asked why I didn't just draw it in CAD first. I have a 1m x .5m CNC routing table, and I teach CAD/CAM systems. Wake Up, Zeke, use your head and let a robot do it!

So now I am point-cloud modeling the final routing template and will be able to do some full-3D carves for the body cavities and the comfort carves. I plan to do a Fender style arm and belly carve, and I will gently bend the top down to glue up. (I will be using a vacuum bag glue-up method)

I think, that I will make my first attempt at binding on this one too. Since I can just tell the robot to cut the binding rebate, I can put the glued body back in the holding fixture to cut the rebate following the same contour as the top-hiding the glue line.

As to finishing...

I want to finish the body in a transparent nitrocellulose. I like the Gibson red-backed mahogany bodies, and I am pretty sure that'd done with a tinted lacquer over a stain? Gonna have to do some practice there, I think.

The aim is to finish the body in a reddish color that doesn't hide the redwood top, and fits with the gold hardware and fretwire.

The consensus may have been 10mm a few days ago, I reduced my current build to 7mm yesterday, it still looks thick enough though, thats in mahogany.

I was wrong, best stick with your first thought of 13mm minimum.

Though that failure might have been due to the extra clamping pressure, rather than the normal stresses that a finished body would have to withstand?

The consensus may have been 10mm a few days ago, I reduced my current build to 7mm yesterday, it still looks thick enough though, thats in mahogany.

I was wrong, best stick with your first thought of 13mm minimum.