topic Re: Guitar Neck shape in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

Guitar Neck shape

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 12:55:54 GMT

Hello, I have been using Fusion 360 for a while now but just cannot work out how to create a smooth transition between the headstock and neck! I am cutting these on CNC and its very time consuming to need to hand carve each one! please help!!

Screen shot attached.

Re: Guitar Neck shape

dbeetcher — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 13:37:33 GMT

Hi, I feel your pain!

I spent a few weeks trying to figure out how to do the headstock and heel transitions. And even now I still have more work to do in order for the curves to be good enough to just do some finish sanding. If you search YouTube, you'll find numerous videos on the different ways that people have done these neck transitions. Some have used the Sculpt mode.......I gave that a try, but it seemed overly complicated. The method I finally used was the Loft function in Model mode. Loft will allow you to quickly generate transition curves that connect one profile to another profile. For example, between a rectangular profile to a circular profile. However, Loft tends to make straight lines between the two profiles, and the transitions at the headstock and heel of the neck are usually gentle curves. There is an option in Loft that allows the use of 'rails'. Think of a rail as a guideline that shapes the loft lines in the curved way that you want. I found that there's more tweaking needed in getting Loft to work well on these transitions, but I don't think I can easily summarize them in this post. There is a "Fusion 360 Luthiers" group on FaceBook, you could ping me there if you need more details about getting Loft to work.

Dan

Re: Guitar Neck shape

lichtzeichenanlage — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 13:41:41 GMT

Perhaps this collection might be solve your problem.

Edit: Missing link added

Re: Guitar Neck shape

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 14:05:06 GMT

Amazing, thanks Dan, I shall give you a message on there!

Re: Guitar Neck shape

jeff_strater — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 14:37:11 GMT

This is a very common question on this forum. This is a deceptively difficult set of geometry to create. If you take do a search on "guitar neck" on this forum, you will get lots of hits. Here are a few:

There are multiple ways to achieve this, using solid Loft, or a pure surfacing approach, or even using TSplines. You will get lots of advice here, please keep asking questions.

Jeff