so, ive been working on various guitar projects, and one of the biggest issues ive had in general is that every time you alter a design, you often have to remake your jigs. in addition you have to swap them out every time you want to mill a different design, then youve also got multiple for each design - front, back, fretboard, headstock, etc.
having a special jig for each operation is ok if you are making 1000 of the same item, but if you want to make custom guitars as most small builders do, you need to be able to slap on a block of wood and have the machine cut it without lost time screwing around with jigs.
make sense? no? ok, good... haha.
this is my solution:
this is a universal neck jig for a dedicated neck making cnc machine.. the central tube is a rotary axis. each side has a vacuum fixture. each fixture is the same in the image, but ultimately will be one for the back of the neck, one for the front, one for the rough wood squaring, and one for the fretboard. the neck angle is adjustable by cnc and it has inserts for headstock shapes. basically it can accomodate almost any neck, from a telecatser to a 9 string multi scale neck through.
the machine it goes on has a travelling column with about 50" travel in the X, and a swiveling spindle, making the setup 5 axis.
the rotary axis moves in the Y, which lets it move the fretboard to a belt sander to radius fretboards. fret slots are cut with a saw on the swivel axis.
combined with some clever software that takes the custom order and compiles the gcode automatically, it basically allows every neck to be completely different yet still have most of the economies of high volume fixtured production.
so any thoughts?