The art of the possible...

building your own CNC guitars..

Making a guitar sled

I start by including my sled layout in my primary guitar design . This will give me a 1: to 1: scale relationship. The red shows the insert blank material and the green shows the sled’s top deck surface.

playing with a full deck.

Here is typical design for a cravewright sled . I am using a one piece plywood or melamine bottom so I get the cleanest contact to the CNC. Melamine plywood works well as it’s not to prone to warp and it can be scribed on the bottom to get better grip on the belts.

For the height of the side rails make the sides the same as the carving wood thickness or a bit taller. Here my side rails are 3/4 thick for a 3/4 thick Guitar top.

I use screws and glue to assemble the sled and if you have any warp in the plywood try putting the crown of the wood down for more pressure on the Carvewrights brass roller.

Why do you need 4” extra on the tails of the sleds why not just 3.5”?

This is a source of a lot of confusion when building carving sleds. Bigger, longer and light weight is better...

You can make your carving sleds tails any size as long as the tails are over 4” or 6” or 7” but not 3.5” I will tell you why, if you are building a guitar it best to setup all your cutting in one pass, but if you have to stop the CNC for any reason you will need to start over now making your design a two or three pass project.

When I place my sled in the carvewrigt I do not center its location but place the sleds 4” tail under the Z trucks board sensor 4” gives just the right amount of room for the board sensor to read over the cross rail and not the guitar body.

Once setup you will be able to “Hit the mark” every time even in the smallest of detail. Now you can make multi pass work adding carvings and re carving details without wasting your $100.00 guitar top.

To stay or not to stay..

We have a CNC moving table system that needs our sled to be captured under the “out feed” and “in feed rollers” at all times as it moves in and out. This is the reason we add 4” to the ends of our carving sleds and also why we make the blueprints in designer the same size as our sled. Electing not to stay under rollers NO “ 02” will not let the carvewright scale your project and still give you the space you need for roller contact .

Perplexing index

Most of the parts on a guitar or violin are caved on a “A” side and “B” side. The wood stock is flipped like a book. What we call a “2 sided project” .

Making the peg box on a violin neck requires that you mortis the tuning peg box out buy hand, here I avoid this by using a 2 sided carving. You can drill out tapered holes to get a nice fit for tuning machines and wooden tuner pegs just buy drilling from the back side of the head stock or violin peg box..

Here is a simple sled design. I used the 1/2 bit in the carvewright to make the pocket for the sled .

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