Faster Than A Speeding Mountain

Hey, everyone!

Note: This post was originally posted by me to BASIS Tucson North's Senior Project page on March 8th, 2018. At the time of writing it, I was on my way to the 2018 FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) AZ North Regional, so it took a very long time to write, as there was inconsistent Wi-Fi while on the highway. Here is the post:

Hi. It’s been a while. Sorry about that, but there hasn’t really been something to report; with the robotics competition starting today (3/8/18), there has been hardly any time for me to work on the guitar (final prep for competition). That being said, I have finally “started” the build.

On Monday, I met with a good friend of mine, Javier Alday, to laser-cut the design out of a sheet of plywood. This will be a template for cutting out the design on the actual piece of wood, which I will be cutting using a band saw and a table-mounted router.

Here’s a video of that:

With the laser-cut template, I realized that the channel I had designed was just a tiny bit too small, and the headstock is too thin; string spacing would be weird and it looked really unbalanced. Because of this, I tried to redesign it, but Solidworks wasn’t cooperating, and it would just move the entire design when I was telling it to move one point. Thinking back on it, it’s probably because of the billion and a half dimensions that I added to it. Oh well. I’ll just expand it by hand later ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Anyways, on Wednesday, I went to Xerocraft with my dad to get started with the actual woodworking. It was kind of eerie being in the woodshop in the middle of the day; there was nobody else in the building but my dad and I, and I had turned on only the lights in the shop, but that’s only half of the back room, which is big, seeing as Xerocraft is an old warehouse. And then there’s the occasional mouse knocking something over in the other room.

We started out with the jointer, which is used to put straight edges on boards. My dad had only used it a couple times, and I had never used it, so we had to figure out how to set up the seventy-year-old machine. It worked well enough on the maple, which I’m using for the neck, so I wanted to move it to the planer-molder to take it down from about 24mm to 18mm (the calipers that I used were in metric only for some reason). The only problem was that neither of us knew how to use the planer, so we had to wait for someone to show up who did. So we waited like an hour, and David Lesser, arguably the best staff member at XC, showed up. While teaching me to use the planer, David had a colorful rant about XC’s archaic machinery, and ended up removing the blades from the jointer. He then got out his “exquisite Japanese water-stones” to sharpen the blades, and that took an hour to do one blade. He then showed me how to cut the rosewood on the table saw so that I could get really thin pieces, which is something I need to do for the fret-board, but said that the table saw’s dust collection was clogged, so if I wanted to use it, it would have to be cleaned out. And then he left.

My dad and I spent the next hour cleaning the machines in the shop. I cleaned out the table saw, and it turns out that not only was the dust collector not connected (the tube was on the floor), but the tube inside the saw had about 5 cubic feet of dust in it. It took quite a while to vacuum it out, and I wish I had taken a picture. We also cleaned the band-saw and the jointer. The jointer looked like it was full of woodchips, and its dust collection was also not attached, so over time it just clogged itself, but the band-saw wasn’t bad at all.

Thankfully, at that point in time, my onsite advisor, Andrew, showed up, and he was able to show me how to use the machine, as well as some tips to make sure that the wood is flat, like marking the surface with pencil or sharpie so that when you run it through the planer, you can see the parts of the board that are lower because they will still have pencil or ink on them. Then, once all the marks are removed, then you know you have a flat board. He also gave me some great tips about how to go about putting the slot in the wood for the truss rod.

Unfortunately, however, after about two hours of planning, my board was a little bit chipped, and I had only removed about 3mm from it, so I called it quits for the week. I’m in the car on the way to Flagstaff for the robotics AZ North Regional, so can’t do anything more this week. This is week 5 already, so I’m super far behind where I wanted to be–should’ve started designing a lot sooner. I didn’t get anywhere near what I wanted to get done this week, but hopefully on Monday, I’ll be able to get the neck cut out completely and start carving.

More updates coming soon!

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Hey, so there's the end of the original post, but I think I may need to explain a few things that came up on the original blog in the comments, as well as some relevant things that may be confusing. First off, whenever I mention a week number, it is because my school gave me 12 weeks to complete this project, and I was originally tasked with creating my own syllabus for that last stretch of the school year. I had been overly ambitious at the time, and thought that I could finish the neck entirely in about four weeks, with me working several hours each day except on weekends.

Another thing is that people had questions about Xerocraft and Laser cutters! Both of which are cool and fun! Xerocraft is a community makerspace in Tucson, Arizona, and it is host to several clubs and things that encourage people to build things. The people at Xerocraft tend to be pretty nice and there is always someone willing to help out. For this particular task (laser cutting), I had the help of Javier Alday, who is pretty skilled with operating a laser cutter, and is also a close friend of mine. It turns out that laser-cutters need to be programmed, and then once they are programmed, they work somewhat like a printer, but read instructions about what lines on a design to engrave, which ones to cut all the way through the material, what speed, and what intensity of laser to use. Its pretty cool stuff!