For Christmas 2014, Robert and Elizabeth bought Bdale a beginner's guitar
book, and Robert offered to help with a guitar build project based on the
success of his Telecaster build. This is the resulting project, Bdale's
-first guitar, started in February of 2015!
+first guitar, started in February and completed in December of 2015!
After a lot of reading and listening, a few core decisions got things rolling:
* build a "clone" of a hard-tail Fender Stratocaster (no tremolo)
* body and neck to be near-natural wood color with satin finish
-* no pickguard (maximum exposed wood grain, rear control cavities
+* no pickguard (maximum exposed wood grain, rear control cavities)
* pickups and all hardware in black
* standard strat-like 3-pickup, 1 volume, 2 tone design with 5-way selector
* second tone control with push-pull switch to phase-reverse middle pickup
## Part Selections ##
-Another intense period of study led to the decision to use
+A period of intense study led to selecting
[DiMarzio](http://dimarzio.com) Area pickups. These are stacked-coil hum
reducing pickups in the standard strat single-coil pickup form factor. The
chosen "standard" set consists of:
[Guitar Fetish](http://www.guitarfetish.com/), with the exception of a nicer
[hard-tail bridge](http://guitarheads.net/products/bridges/hardtailrear.html)
sourced from [GuitarHeads.Net](http://guitarheads.net), and a 22-fret natural
-Canadian maple neck purchased from eBay seller "bluelink88".
+Canadian maple neck purchased from eBay seller "bluelink88", and black machine
+screws in several sizes sourced from Amazon.
## Purchased Items ##
|guitarheads.net|||||
|black hard tail bridge||1|16.99|16.99|
+## Body ##
+
+I started out with a 1962 Stratocaster design file created in Alibre by
+user protomachinst6 on CNCzone.
+
+http://www.cnczone.com/forums/musical-instrument-design-and-construction/17659-cnc-32.html
+
+I originally hoped that I would be able to use FreeCAD to modify this design,
+but the STEP import process seemed to lose the ability to keep the various
+sub-assemblies oriented correctly relative to each other. Since Alibre has
+been replaced by Geomagic Design, I pulled down a 15-day trial version of
+that package to one of the Windows machines in the house, and (not
+surprisingly) it was able to read the file just fine. I was then able to
+export just the body and read that into FreeCAD, which was used for the
+remainder of the design work.
+
+Another interesting STEP file of the body from a 1962 strat drawn by Marc
+Erasmus is available on [GrabCAD](https://grabcad.com/library/62-strat-asm)
+and it appears at least one person has actually built a guitar using these
+files.
+
+To build the guitar body I want, the existing body design file was
+modified to eliminate the tremolo cut-out and rear cavity, to add screw holes
+for the hard-tail bridge, and to shift the electronics cavity from being
+front-open to being rear-accessible with the front just having 3 holes for
+the volume and tone control shafts and the slot and mounting screw holes
+needed for the pickup selector switch.
+
+The first attempt to cut the body on our CNC router failed, because a large
+delivery of building materials happened in the middle of the roughing pass,
+and I naively thought the router would be ok cutting for a while without
+me. Apparently, swarf jammed the bit up enough to cause the machine to lose
+steps and shut itself down. Unfortunately, when I attempted to restart the
+cut, something went horribly wrong and the roughing cutter put a deep gouge
+through much of the body of the guitar. I decided to call this attempt a
+bust, and look for more wood to start over with.
+
## Wiring ##
A standard strat has a volume control, 2 tone controls, and a 5-way pickup
resistor in parallel between the hot and wiper terminals on the volume
control. This may or may not seem necessary once we have the guitar together.
+## Artifacts ##
+
+The following files are licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
+International License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/):
+
+* [FreeCAD](http://www.freecadweb.org/) design file for
+ [guitar body](guitarbody.fcstd)
+* [STL output](guitarbody.stl) from FreeCAD for guitar body
+
+
More to come!
projects / web / gag.com / blobdiff