After decades of building guitars by hand I've decided to revisit my roots in the guitar making field and adopt a small shop CNC. After a few recent builds I came to the realization that my mind works faster than my hands. I have a backlog of unbuilt designs for guitars and parts going back almost 30 years, plus a stream of new ideas. I'm a perfectionist and spending hours making high precision templates for every variation in pickup and control layouts, scale, inlay, or nut width just wasn't sustainable. Add to that the physical wear and tear on the hands and shoulders and it just doesn't make sense to spend hours cutting fret slots or carving body contours by hand anymore.

For many guitarists the word CNC conjures an image of mass producton factories churning out thousands of identical pieces. Its not unusual for builders myself included to promote their instruments as handmade. Yet unless youre talking about acoustics, that almost always still means built with handheld power tools. I can't imagine anyone cutting a solidbody shape out with a handsaw or hand planing the glue faces of laminate top. CNC is just another much more advanced power tool controlled remotely from a keypad. Theres no magic button you still have to know how to design and construct it. So for me its a way to bring new ideas to life much faster and more predictably than ever before. Want your body with smaller contours or the volume knob moved a 1/4"? No problem! This is where a small scale CNC in the hands of an experiencd luthier shines.

For my entire building career I've meticulously drawn all my designs in CAD then printed them full scale and machined templates form MDF and acrylic. So the transition has a big headstart. Here's a shot of the machine in action cuting an N2 rear control cavity. Still makes a load of sawdust to cleanup! Other body designs and necks are in the works...More to come..stay tuned!
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..My sincere thanks to the teams and user communities at Carbide 3D and Vectric for their help thus far on this journey...