Fretboard and guitar neck

Things You've Made
1

Hello All,

After lots of experimenting trying to get feeds and speeds just right I finally have my first usable fretboard.

I snapped 5 bits before I got the speeds right. :frowning:

Well, I snapped one when I dropped it on the ground. The tip of these are just 0.61mm thick. Very easy to break. I think especially on the mpcnc as it is not the stiffest design. Even the tiniest amount of chatter will snap it very quickly.

For those interested:

3mm/s feed rate

2mm/s plunge rate

1.8mm depth of cut

The wood is hard maple. The depth of the slot is 2mm.

It is actually much quicker and easier to cut these on the table saw. But this is the only way to get ā€œblind fret slotsā€. Meaning that they donā€™t go to the end of the board. They stop before the end so you canā€™t see them from the sides.

My next step is to try this on much denser wood. Maple is as soft as you want to go for a fretboard. It has a janka of 1450. My preferred fretboard material is African Blackwood with a janka of 3750. Wish me luck!

Cheers,

ā€˜Michael Yeomans

5A869447-D7B6-46B7-9D03-D64370A01F15.jpeg

6F0AB9E0-64AC-479B-8FBE-EFB45CB03AC6.jpeg

3 Likes
2

Thanks for the speeds. I snapped one on a test run in plywood on some text I was doing with my fine bit set.

Nowā€¦ back to my MPCNC

1 Like
3

Wow, I am pretty excited to finally see something like this. I would be so scared to use such a tiny tool, Please upload a picture of the project when it gets a little more complete.

4

We ought to get together and brainstorm a tool size vs percentage of speed rule of thumb. So a 3mm tool runs at at x speed with the preferred depth, a 1mm tools does 1/3 the speed safely, a 0.5mm at 1/6 the speedā€¦ Iā€™m guessing they wonā€™t be that simple, perhaps following the cross section area? Cutting edges with deeper designs for chip evacuation would likely snap easier than one thatā€™s shallow.

5

Btw, I listed my depth of cut as 1.8mm. I meant .18mm.

Ā