Fusion
Hi Fusion community, (and especially guitar makers),
I wanted to let you know that I’ve been working on a cool project with our friends at CNC Router Parts. As I said way back in October, in this thread, I had started on this project to design and produce a guitar body with Nathan Skalsky, who is part owner of CNC Router Parts. Rather than my usual modeling projects, which just resulted in a Fusion model, I wanted to approach this with the idea of actually producing a real, physical, playable guitar. Since then, we’ve been busy in design and implementation. Since we both have day jobs, it’s taken us a while, but we are finally at a point where we can declare the project done.
In my past guitar making, I’ve always only done completely flat-slab type designs, because it was relatively easy to cut out the shape on a bandsaw from a flat chunk of wood. But, I’ve always wanted to do a carved top guitar. I realized that the combination of 3D design in Fusion + CNC for manufacturing would give me a powerful way to explore this type of design. We are also working on a hollow-body version, which we think will further illustrate the power of CNC + 3D modeling.
We learned a lot. We made a lot of mistakes along the way: Everything from mis-measurements of the neck and bridge positions and height to tool path errors to simple human mis-communication of who was making which changes in which order. We made lots of test runs using cheap wood, each of which revealed things we hadn’t thought of (for instance, that the mounting screws for the bridge can’t go into the control cavity!). However, we are very happy with the results. The Fusion model, I think, came out pretty cleanly. It is fully parametric, and can withstand customization of the outside shape, the carved top shape, etc., and updates without errors.
Here is the model in Fusion:
An early test run using glued-up cheap Home Depot pine:
After milling:
The finished body:
And all assembled:
Interested in learning more about our workflow, or want to make your own 3D sculpted guitar with Fusion 360?
Download our Fusion 360 design file from our Thingiverse: 3D Sculpted Electric Guitar project page
Watch our "Design & Make" Videos Walk-throughs:
- Making a 3D Sculpted Guitar using the Benchtop PRO CNC Machine
- Customizing the 3D Sculpted Guitar Design in Fusion 360
- Designing a 3D Sculpted Guitar using Fusion 360
- Creating CNC G-Gode for the 3D Sculpted Guitar using Fusion 360
I’m hoping to start a discussion here about guitar design and building using Fusion. Feel free to ask any questions, make any comments, etc., and we’ll be happy to respond.
@jeff_strater & @nathan.skalsky
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
