BYO: Maccaferri Concert Model

DarrenKingUK

Is a bolt on neck considered complete sacrilege and are the any practical reasons not to use this on a SelMac instrument? I just think this may give me more scope for alignment adjustments especially with the absence of a truss rod. Thoughts?

DarrenKingUK

Last week I bonded the three 13mm x 3mm carbon fibre reinforcements into the necks using West System epoxy. Today I machined my first 3D modelled necks and it was actually considerably more straight forward than I had anticipated. Cross sections and their paths were drawn in Adobe Illustrator and then imported into Rhino. The surfaces were then lofted and the model imported into Vectric VCarve Pro which then created a roughing path and a finish path along with a registration line and a mask cut out for the vacuum bed of the CNC router. There are a few small anomalies in the machining at the sides of the volute but nothing that can’t be fettled by hand. Overall I think it worked pretty well. I ran a test section in softwood before committing one of the ‘real’ necks.

I really thought hard about the joint between the head and the neck and decided on the angled joint as I think it is so much more attractive than the hard butt joint on the originals.

Bones

Wow a CNC router. How much do they sell for? Pretty cool.

DarrenKingUK

I’m about to determine the bridge position for my Concert model Maccaferri. Does anyone have a recommendation for the best/preferred nylon strings for this guitar so that I can put some string dimensions into the position compensation calculator? I understand that this is less critical than with steel string instruments so if the answer is that I shouldn’t worry too much then that’s fine, I’d just like to know.

Thanks

Darren

Bones

No clue about the nylon strings. Sorry, maybe Michael knows?

max

Looks great!

How does the wectors from illustrator look in rhino?

I’ve had a Lot of problems exporting dwg or dxf from illustrator to vectric or fusion.

Illustrator exports with way more wectors then needed, sometimes several hundreds for wery simple shapes, and it’s a lot of work to clean up in vectric.

I’m sure the fault is coming from illustrator..

Nice looking necks..

DarrenKingUK

Hi Max,

Thanks for your comments.

You can import native Illustrator files directly into Vectric so there is no need to convert them to .dxf or .dwg files at all. I don't use Fusion so I don't know whether the same applies.

When I do need to convert Illustrator files to .dxf then I either do it in Bezarc or you can do it in VCarve. Import the native illustrator file and then select the 'export' function from the file menu. I don't tend to use the 'export' function in Illustrator as I haven't had much luck with it either.

Regards

Darren

mac63000

https://www.djangobooks.com/forum/discussion/comment/99025#Comment_99025

A bit late to the conversation but I'm a big fan of Hannabach nylons. I'm guessing their medium tensions would be fine?

billyshakes

Will love to see the finished product here. Keep the photos coming. Looks like really nice work. How many are you building?

DarrenKingUK

Sorry I went a bit quiet on this project but here ares some pics of the finished guitar. How does it sound? Well I need to spend a bit of time on the frets and I think the bridge could do with being about 0.75mm higher to cut out a bit of fret buzz on the bass strings but I think it will be pretty good once these issues have been addressed. I have one other Concert model in birdseye maple which I am making but I have been mainly working on a petite bouche which is nearly ready to lacquer and I'll post pics of this under a different topic.