Keilty Guitarworks

25/12/2025

The CNC will make the part, but it won’t do the final fit, clean up the transitions or sand to 220. Time to pull paper- but not today. Merry Christmas!

25/12/2025

Time to pull paper. But not today. Merry Christmas!

24/12/2025

Hot from the oven on Xmas eve and ready for dressing.

19/12/2025

I’m thinking maybe 1 mm instead of 2 mm maple binding next time. Trying to bend this stuff into the curves, even after heating and pre-bending, was like trying to wrestle a crowbar. I haven’t done one of these since looth school, and not with wood. I learned a few things in the process. Onward!

17/12/2025

So far, I’m liking it.

15/12/2025

Because I’m lazy.

13/12/2025

Since I’ve been on a fusion tear lately, (which of course has nothing to do with the fact that I just renewed my yearly subscription), I decided to take a much-needed mental break from CAM-ing out the Miranda , and do a little exploratory modeling of carve tops for something else in the pipeline. I thought about giving plasticity a try for this, because it’s not something that fusion wants to do very easily, but once I started thinking about how I would do it by hand, I think we’re getting with striking distance of a machinable result that can be cleaned up with a finger plane.

10/12/2025

09/12/2025

Step by step. It’s a simple thing, but the hours of thinking this through, followed up by the fixture design and programming sequence to execute it are…a lot.

One of the big things I’m trying to solve with the CNC is taking human air out of part alignment, and a headstock overlay is no different. There are lots of ways to do this, but because I personally prefer a slightly angled peg head, it’s nice to be able to do the headstock overlay as a separate component.

Here’s the thinking part:

so we have indexing holes drilled for the tuners- nothing new there. The outer curve of the headstock is cut with a 3 mm excess- but the shelf for the nut is included in the overlay profile, and that is cut to exactly the same dimensions as the end of the fretboard, with a 2 mm standoff to compensate for the 7° headstock angle.

So what that means is that to index the head stock on center, all you have to do is lineup the edge of the component with the fretboard. A couple of Brad nails through your choice of tuner indexing holes and a clamping caul flattened by the machine to the appropriate angle, and Bob’s your uncle.

Then, of course, you come back at the end with your 8th inch and mill and cut the nut shelf, which also gives you a perfectly square angle on your veneer.

09/12/2025

There’s still a lot of hand work that goes into using a CNC machine. It’s actually part of the attraction – more time spent on little details like this.

Ultimately, I’m probably gonna look at brass and aluminum for the logo medallions, but it’s fun to practice on hardwood scraps. I’ll try binding a few of these or maybe inlay some brass wire in the channels. Lots of stuff to try.

07/12/2025

My CNC game is moving up from the minor leagues. I’ve always wanted to produce as many components for my instruments in my own shop as possible, rather than buying off the shelf.

16/11/2025

So, let’s talk about the joys of guitar building using a CNC machine.

Building a guitar with a CNC is nothing like building by hand. In fact, building by hand is a lot easier. To build a guitar with a CNC, I first had to assemble the CNC machine, and learn how one of these things works. Then, I had to teach myself in advanced software suite of 3-D modeling tools. That took about two years to grasp the basics, and another three to really learn the advanced workflows specific to my industry.

Then I had to learn to be a machinist. Fixturing, workholding, machining offsets, part flip indexing (still challenging- hell, just squaring up the gantry to the spindle to designing the spoil board setup took a lot of cogitation.

Then there were the bits that I broke, the air pistons that I wrecked, the upgrades I had to install, not to mention a small fortune worth of MDF that I butchered before I wrapped my head around feeds and speeds and tool changes and cut depths.

So here we are, last Monday- I’ve got all that stuff pretty much figured out, a couple of beautiful pieces of wood, screaming to be turned into a guitar neck, all the programs adjusted after doing a 3 1/2 hour test carve- and on Monday morning my spindle brushes decided to give up the ghost. A $25 part that, without which, $15,000 worth of machinery is dead in the water.

If you don’t build this way because it’s easy. It’s definitely not “press button, get guitar”. You do it because once you go through all this grief and aggravation, you can make the guitars as close to perfect as they can be.

That’s why you do it.