Hey all,
I’m looking at building a rotary axis in order to mill a guitar neck from laminated plywood,
Do you think it’ll be able to handle this? and secondly, am I likely to experience huge tear out?
The goal would be to mill this guitar neck, so it would be quite long… The uggo headstock will be changing soon.
Unless that neck is rounded on the fret side you dont need a rotary. You can machine it from one side as it lays like in your drawing. You will use a ball endmill to get the rounded back. Unless there is something I am missing it should be pretty straight forward. For any grooves on the fret side you will want to machine those first. Then using locating pins in your extra stock flip it over and machine the back.
Cheers for the reply - I’ve never really looked into ball mills, maybe it’s time I took the plunge.
There are a couple of reasons for wanting/using the rotary axis - In future I’d like to start trying to carve some shoe lasts, they’ll probably be from pine blocks or something, so this is almost a build up to that.
Secondly I was talking to a friend of mine who is a luthier making bass necks from plywood blanks, he has had tear out problems with his overhead router rig where the router moves over the stock with tearout, I’m thinking if the stock is moving instead of that router bit this could stop it from happening, in my head if I used a straight single flute with a rotary axis it would end with a cleaner finish, am I barking up the wrong tree on this one?
