[Ed_R]

The bosch is brand new and so is the spiral-upcut bit. Is tripping your limits just having an axis stop moving but the motore still humming? That's what's happenign with mine.

[gregmary]

Sounds like your motor is stalling. How much current are you pushing through it?

[Ed_R]

I have no idea. But it's happened on all three motors.

[turmite]

Ed tripping the limit will cause a estop in Mach2 which brings all movement to a stop. Motors won't be humming. I agree with Greg, it does sound like stalling.

You bought this machine...right? What are the recommended or advertised feed and rapid speeds of the machine? What size motors are used and do you have their specs. Same for the drivers? Controller? All of this will help.

Mike

[Ed_R]

I bought it from deepgroove, and I didn't get so much as any assembly instructions, much less any specs or the like. I have 116 ounce powermax motors and a xylotex 3-axis controller. THere are no limit switches. I'm running TurboCNC.
SO a low voltage to the controller or to the motors? Where do I check the voltage going to the motors and how coudl I change it? GUess I better ask teh xylotex people.

[turmite]

Personally I'd be caling Deepgroove. They designed it, they ought to make it work. Is it a moving table or moving gantry? An approximate weight for which ever moving system you have would be helpful. What is the machine made from? Give all the info you can and yes, I would also ask the xylotex folks.

Mike

[Ed_R]

Deepgroove is about useless for this sort of thing. All he'll do is tell me it's my problem. I bought it off eBay, it's an aluminum-framed moving gantry machine. It took over 3 weeks to get here from purchase. Deepgroove's in your neck of the woods, in New Jersey somewhere, and judging from his lack of concern on it taking three weeks to ship, his response will be similar to this problem.
THe machine's built in Missouri, not New Jersey. IT gets drop-shipped from the maker, who's a single guy runninga machine shop.
Guess I can try deepgroove aain but I'm not optimiztic.

[gregmary]

I had a similar problem with one of my axis. I played around with TurboCNC, adjusting the max speed, start speed and accel of the motor. If I started too fast or went too fast it would stall. The axis would not move, but the motor buzzed. I ended up using a bigger power supply voltage (I went from 12Volts to 48Volts) and increased the current to my motors. After I did this the speed went way up and it never stalled, but then I started getting a really hot motor. I backed off on the current until I still got good power out of the system, but the motor was only medium hot (it gets hot, but I can hold my hand on it). I ended up with about 5amps of current to a pretty low inductance bi-polar motor. No problems since.

[gregmary]

I got distracted, but I am back on the Strat. Here I am finishing off the headstock. I had the CNC cut the headstock a little oversized. I then glued a template of the final headstock outline and used a drum sander to get the exact profile I wanted. You can see the end of the truss rod through the hole in the head stock. The hole was plugged by a piece of walnut turned down to the correct diameter. Then I used the drum sander again to sand the walnut plug to the shape of the head stock. I am now ready to finish sanding the neck, stain it, and cut the fret slots. I'll then laquer it. I want to go for a glossy finish on all of the neck but the actual fret board I want a satin finish.

[erose9]

That's pretty wild-what is the diam. of the walnut plug hole? Will you be sawing the fret slots by hand? When you sand the walnut plug to the shape of headstock, are you using a holder jig to keep it straight up and down, or hand held? The neck looks great.
ER

[Johnny 2uvr]

Greetings all,
I would like to participate in this. What type of file is your solid shown in the thumbnails ?

[gregmary]

Enough with the Strat neck, Let's get started with the body. Here I have loaded the Mahogany blank on the CNC and have routed the back side completely flat. In the second picture I have finished roughing the back cutout with a .75 flat end mill. the third pic shows the ball end mill working the dish out. And finally the last pic shows the completely machined back. Does it look like a strat body triing to get out of the block of wood? All ya got to do is cut away everything that doesn't look like a strat.

[gregmary]

Flip the part over and machine the other side........
Click on the photo for a larger view

[corrie]

As allways Greg looking mighty fine.Will you have the draditional picup configuration or will you introduce a humbucker in there as well as some single coils.Hrd tail or whammy,cause I don,t see a route for a whammy.No matter nice job, :cheers:

[777funk]

I've seen some modern strats with that 1/4" tool hole in the neck pocket so it does exist.

[777funk]

How do you separate the Front and Back cuts in programing your machine? What I mean is the front gets one series of cuts (pickup cavities, control Routing etc) While the back gets another set of cuts for the trem cavity. Do you need to have 2 separate dxf files for the machine to do this ?

[vacpress]

777-

While I havent CNC'd a guitar(yet..) I have done some rather compelx parts on a 3-axis machine. Ive had one part take as many as 5 seperate sets of GCODE. I beleive this is common. CNC tools are not as simple as a inkjet printer!

I think the procedure would be:

1.Model your Guitar.
2.Decide how your machine is going to cut it, in this case, 2 passes, one on each side(lets pretend it is all cut with 1 bit5)
3.Get your piece of stock ready. Cut it very accurately.. We used to use a nice Planner to set the thickness, and a tablesaw to cut the material(REN board usually, much like a really uniform soft wood, but better.. not for a gutiar though.. well.. maybe...)

4.The origin, lets say lower left corner is where each side will start getting machined from. you can either generate Gcode that will pause at the end of side 1, or you can split your model in half and use 2 seperate sets of code. This is what I usually did, because of my low skill level in Gibbs CAM.

5.Load the first GCode and let it cut side 1, at the end of your code, you need to have it return to origin, or have some other method of getting it there...

6. Flip over the stock, use great care to keep the origin in its start location

7. load the second set of code and run


get the idea? Ive made a part that had to be machined on both sides, and then loaded into a jig and machined at some crazy angle...

Cant wait to get my machine running so I can try to make an isntrument.. As a drummer, i am partial to drums.. But as a really bad guitarist, I wouldnt mind owning something a bit nicer than my early-90s, white on black tawain strat copy!

[vacpress]

Oh, for me, I would use solidworks to cut my 3d model in half.. sort of a mahual, long route, but i didnt know how to use Gibbs to do the 2-sided stuff. I found setting my [parts up in Solidworks, and using mostly the easy to understand operations in gibbs..

like... 1/2" 2-flute roughing at 100ipm, .1 deep cut, and then 1/4" ballnose for finishm etc... but then, we used the machine to create industrial design models.. tolerances were... 1/32, roguhly.. parts had to look right... even with these looser tolerances, I was very carefull, and probably had some very good results...

Then, we had a 15,000$ 4x4' gantry router...

[anoel]

I just finished the Dinky Strat that I posted about earlier in this thread. I used my CNC to make routing templates to build this one.

[corrie]

Nice job brother,is the body mahogany.Looks real good,keep it up.