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)!!!

We recently purchased the dxf files for creating a Sam Maloof designed rocking chair.  Two of our advanced students have taken the project on and we will do our best to document the project as it moves forward.  One of the things we decided to do is to run all of the individual files on Pine instead of the traditional walnut so that we can work out any bugs and techniques. 

It has been a very busy summer and it all kicked off with the Summer STEM Academy at Grants Pass High School and in partnership with Rogue Community College.  Take a look at the short video to see what these 6th, 7th and 8th graders were able to accomplish while they were here!  We also worked hard to get our new Shopbot 5-axis CNC up and running and we learned a ton about creating 3 dimensional designs on the 3 axis CNC using Aspire. 


Summer STEM Academy video here!

Even though the school year has ended we have plenty to keep us busy.  Our first Summer STEM Academy for middle school students has come to a close and it was a fantastic success.  Forty-six kids from around our region participated in 4 days of hands-on learning in three different areas of study; Drafting and CAD design, CNC and Laser design and operation and Metals Fabrication.  These kids worked with programs such as Solidworks, Bridge Designer, VCarve Pro and RDWorks.  Rather than go on and on about what they have been doing for the last week I thought you should see it for yourselves.

I want to thank a whole bunch of folks for making this STEM Academy such a success.  I hope I don't leave anybody out!
Superintendent Higgins for making this happen!
The entire District Office staff at GPHS for taking such good care of us (Tonya, Trisha, Sherry...)
Shopbot and Boss Laser for the amazing and DURABLE machines the students learned how to design for and use.
Brenda Bunge, Kirstie Christopherson and Brian Robin for the efforts put into the Revitalization Grant.
Everyone at Rogue Community College for their support and assistance.
Susan Essin and Woodcraft of Eugene for getting our tooling to us in time.
MasterBrand Cabinets for a bunch of material that the kids used in their projects.
Port Plastics for the help with the King ColorCore.


As mentioned, if I neglected to mention anybody I sincerely apologize.  It took a lot of people to make this work.

We just took delivery of a new Shopbot 5-axis CNC router!  This machine will add to our stable of CAM machines and provide our students with an incredible opportunity to explore the world of high-end machining processes.  We got her out of the crate yesterday morning and are expecting to get the electrical and pneumatics hooked up in the next week or so.

We have made it through another year at Grants Pass High.  It has been an incredibly productive one to say the least.  We added a new Shopbot CNC router, a Boss CO2 laser, injection and blow molders and vacuum formers.  In a week or two we should see another flagship piece of machinery thanks to the CTE Revitalization Grant (Thank you Brenda, Kirstie and Brian for all of your hard work).  Shopbot is shipping us a brand new 5-Axis CNC router!  Take a look below at some of the things that have been created this year.