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I finally got around to deciding which way to go for my 3D CAD/CAM.
I went with Rhino 4.0 and madCAM.
I threw in Flamingo nXt and Rhinoworks for good measure.

Designed a 34' radius dish with a bit of trouble here and there.
I rendered it with a metal surface so I could see the dish shape nicely.
Seems to be good....I'm going to try and make some tool paths and cut wood tomorrow!



I have a steep learning curve (NURBS curve, no doubt) ahead of me.....

How long do you reckon before I have a working parametric model of a fretboard?

Cheers for now,
Dave F.

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Cambrian Guitars

"There goes Mister Tic-Tac out the back with some bric-brac from the knick-knack rack"

Hard to say because we don't know your skill level with the software. I'd consider myself at a low to medium intermediate level with SolidWorks (my CAD software) and I think it took me about 4 hours to make a design table driven fretboard model several months ago when I wasn't as good with it yet. Most of that time was making the spreadsheet design table and learning how that works in SW. If I had to do the same now, I couldn't see it taking much more than 2 or 3 hours including tidying up the design spreadsheet so it looks nice.

I imagine that if you've already done all the Rhino and RhinoWorks tutorials I couldn't see it taking more than 10 hours to make a fretboard model for someone learning the software. I'd try to set aside 2 to 4 hour chunks of time to work on it if you can.

Drawing the fretboard itself is actually very easy. Simply make the nut and end profile and loft in-between them. The time consuming part is automating the fret position calculation and typing in all the dimensions etc.

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http://www.birkonium.com CNC Products for Luthiers
http://banduramaker.blogspot.com

Rhinoworks looks pretty solid, I'd looked at their earlier product and thought it was a bit immature but now it seems it's most of the way there except for design tables. I'm going to have to try it out now...aaand on their website it says it's a no-go for 64 bit systems. That's disappointing.

So far as fretboards go, the most annoying bit is going to be the fret slot placement. It looks like the plugin doesn't support equations, so it's possible that you will have to scale1d the fret slot curves manually to the right spacing and then project them onto the top surface of the fretboard.

If you spend a lot of time on it, your speed with CAD will increase greatly. Of course, you could also be doing other things with your time rather than spending all day doing CAD work so there's a balance there. I'm silly fast at it now, but I've got a few thousand hours under my belt by now, too

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

Just a small update: RhinoWorks 3.0 is now available for 64-bit systems.

I've just downloaded the trial and I'm about to give it a try. The mechanical animation aspect is really exciting to me as I'm working on some tuning and adjustable saddle hardware and it'd be nice to see it moving within Rhino.


Sorry for bumping such an old thread but I thought it'd be better than starting a new thread.