So here we have it, 22 freshly machined Maple necks and their fretboards, waiting to find owners.  The fretboards are the only pre-made portions of the guitars as we just don't have the tooling to do them ourselves.  The necks, however, were made right here in our shop on the Shopbot CNC.  They were pretty time consuming but I think we did a really nice job for our first shot at it.

Here is a short video of our Shopbot in action, milling the profile of one of the bodies.

It has been a long and productive summer here at Grants Pass High School.  It all started with a course in guitar building in which 20 educators from around Southern Oregon participated.  A special thanks to the crew that make it all possible; Steve Brown, Nancy Chang, Debbie French, David Lake and James Huntington Cordero (thank you for the fantastic photos) were the most patient, knowledgeable and committed group of folks we could have ever asked for.  They worked with us while enduring long hours, stifling heat and a whole lot of silly questions.  This was the culmination of months of effort by so many people at the STEM project (www.guitarbuilding.org), Rogue Community College, SOESD and of course our own heroes at Grants Pass School District 7.  The fruits of all of the labor will be borne this school year as two full sections of guitar fabrication will take place here in our own little woodshop.  Our hope is to fill these classes at the high school and to provide our students with the most amazing hands-on STEM education imagineable.  Oh, and every kid will walk out of here at the end of the semester with their very own custon, hand-built electric guitar!  Just like we did this summer!

Below are a couple of videos from the Summer Institute showing the swirl dipping process.  This was one of the really exciting portions of the class as we all got a little bit of instant gratification when the bodies came out of the finishing booth (a trash can).

All slide show photos are courtesy of James Huntington Cordero.  Thank you James!

One of the coolest days of the Institute was when John Page graciously paid us a visit.  He spent the afternoon with all of us providing advice and just chatting with all of us.  Our instructors got the special treatment when John invited them out to visit his shop in Sunny Valley.  If the pictures that James took during the visit are any indication, they had a great time.  Thank you John!..... and we can't wait to have you here at the High School spending a little bit of your valuable time with the kids in our new Guitar Fabrication classes!

Last year I purchased a set of plans for the CNC to build a Sam Maloof rocking chair.  A student decided to take the challenge and commit to making this beauty to the left.  It was a year long process with other projects in between but he completed it just in time.  As you can see, he entered it on our County Fair and took home pretty much every prize available so now it is on its way to the State Fair.  I can't imagine that it won't take home the bacon at the State level as well.
Although much of the rocker was milled on the Shopbot CNC, there was a ton of hand-work that had to be done and without Jordan's talent it never would have gotten this far.  Congratulations on a job well done!

The CNC plans were good, but we still had to tweak a few things to get all of the pieces to machine the way we needed them.  Every part was first machined out of Pine so that we could verify the toolpaths and make the necessary changes prior to cutting them out in Walnut. 

  We happened to run across a website that is in partnership with the National Science Foundation which offers STEM courses in CNC guitar building...www.guitarbuilding.org offers a range of styles that one can make on the CNC and since we have had quite a few solid body instruments built in the past with more traditional methods we thought we would give it a whirl.  Once again, we test all of the files our on inexpensive pine prior to machining more expensive chunks of material.  After making a few mistakes in our choice of toolpaths we hit upon the perfect combination of feeds and speeds as well as the correct order to run the files.
The site offers a number of different styles of body and they also sell complete hardware kits for each model.  We are machining the neck next so stay tuned for the completed project!

Oh yeah, we also made a new stool for the CNC station (we broke the old metal one)!!!