Official Luthiers Forum!

I got your PM Jason,

Give me a call so we can meet up soon. Also I spoke with another friend who has 5 or 6 machines. Some of which he would sell if you are interested in one. He's local as well.

Mike

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I'm outside looking in, just farther from the window than most.

I downloaded VisualMill Pro, and installed it today. It's actually pretty intuitive, and after watching the tutorials on their site, I created the tool paths for a mortise and tenon template that I designed. Of course, that doesn't mean that it would actually work. Hopefully, we shall soon see.

Andy,
I went to a guys shop locally that has a Raptor, and got to see it in action. Very nice machine. His was setup pretty simply, and he wasn't doing anything too complicated with it, but it was solid, and precise. Very cool stuff.

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Jason McGowan
M&S Guitars
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United States of America, looks like another silent night
As we're sung to sleep by philosophies that save the trees and kill the children....
Casting Crowns

Download a free application named OpenSCAM. It shows you what your part will look like after milling and the tool path.

Andy,

Knowing what you know now, if you had to go back and do it over, would you just go ahead and go with the kflop and Kmotion and leave the mach3 out of the equation?

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Jason McGowan
M&S Guitars
_____________________________
United States of America, looks like another silent night
As we're sung to sleep by philosophies that save the trees and kill the children....
Casting Crowns

Got an email from George at XZerocnc saying that his last Raptor sold. He said that shortly he will have a 20x48, and a 48x48. The 20x48 seems to be kind of a weird size, and definitely not optimal. The 48x48 seems to be on the big side, and has me wondering if the 381oz stepper motors would be enough to really move that Gantry the way it should.. tsk tsk.

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Jason McGowan
M&S Guitars
_____________________________
United States of America, looks like another silent night
As we're sung to sleep by philosophies that save the trees and kill the children....
Casting Crowns

It's hard to say. If I could go back in time but keep the knowledge I have now, then for sure I would. However, building and getting a CNC machine running with zero experience is a pretty big deal and takes some time. Kmotion CNC requires customization of the C-code and I haven't written anything in C in almost 20 years!

If you have the patience to get it up and running, I'd say that it's probably a better choice.

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

I am not Andy, but I just now am finishing up redoing my machine. I would have gone with the kflop in a heartbeat, if, and a big if, the designer had a plug and play version that did not require learning to program in c! I am personally too old to have the desire to learn that.

Instead, I went with an Ethernet Smooth Stepper and love it. I found the support to be a little slow, but no more so than the Kflop, but ESS does have it's own support forum. While my machine has never been what I would call smooth, it did smooth out a good bit with the smooth stepper! It actually works!

I also have a commercial controller that is a full 4 axis plus spindle control with built in plc tons of i/o and all the bells and whistles. The retail on the control was $5000 and I am now trying to decide whether to use it to build a new machine I need, or sell it to fund some of the other parts!

There is also a USB controller called PlanetCnc http://www.planet-cnc.com/ that has its own gui and does not use Mach and then the http://www.cs-lab.eu/en/artykul-21-CSMI ... nload.html controller which uses Mach.

Mike

CAM:
Visual Mill Basic and MADCam 3X are both capable packages for around 1K. I'd start with one of those and upgrade to a higher tier if you find you need to.


Controls:
KFLOP leaves pretty much everything in the dust, including a lot of industrial controllers, but it's 100% true that you've got to be able to code to make it work for you (or know someone who can?). Support is very responsive, same day, and there's both a mailing list and a forum on CNCZone...but you've got to be able to code to make it work for you. You can make a great machine by retrofitting a 90's era industrial CNC router or mill with a KFLOP, especially one with a dead control, and you can even reuse the motors and drives (so no extra costs beyond the KFLOP)...but you've got to be able to code and reverse engineer the control system and drives to make it work for you. My old 1994 Fadal absolutely cooked after we re-brained it.

I haven't had much time to mess with it since the basic setup, but my current machine cost me $6500 + $1000 freight. It's a 4'x4' mid-90's fixed-bridge industrial router with three 18K RPM 5-horse spindles, retrofitted with a KFLOP. It also came with a proper 5-horse vacuum pump, and a 2" thick aluminum dual-zone vacuum table. It suddenly makes a lot of sense to hire someone to help with the control retrofit when you can get the equivalent of a $30K machine for 7K in parts plus time.

There are people using the KFLOP (with the Mach3 plugin) as hardware glue to run their machines, but that's replacing a lot of the advantages of the KFLOP with Mach3's flaws.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

As someone who already does this. That is we make electric guitar kits for music stores to then onsell, or for there guitar building courses.

Have you given it plenty of thought.

What price are you going to sell your kits for.

I ask because we are looking to get out of it now as there is no profit IMO

Mirwa,

I honestly have no idea as of yet. I can tell you that we will do our best to be competitive with everything that we do. I don't anticipate guitars and their parts to be a majority of our business though. We will go after local work and contracts first and foremost to pay the bills.

I see it this way... There are two reasons to do anything: love or profit. If you don't have one or the other, and hopefully both, its not worth doing. If I didn't love making kits, and it wasn't profitable, I would discontinue the item.

Do you guys sell the kits in AU only? I can't see it being profitable if you are exporting, but locally I would think you could make at least something. Before I discontinued the kits, I would raise the price to become profitable with an explanation to my stores of the reasoning. If they discontinued buying them, then sobeit.

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Jason McGowan
M&S Guitars
_____________________________
United States of America, looks like another silent night
As we're sung to sleep by philosophies that save the trees and kill the children....
Casting Crowns

Why not sell guitar kits direct to consumer/hobbyists? Promote what you do as the high quality alternative...

Warmoth does pretty good business here in the 'States with this, and so do AllParts as well as StewMac, WD, etc. Sure, they have wholesale prices, but they make their real dough on direct sales.

You're not going to compete with Asian guitars or parts. Don't even try.

You need to know how much you intend to sell them for.

We only sell in Australia and we only sell here locally

Our process is completley refined to streamline.

China charges about 35 dollars for a diy kit, we charge 250 dollars and we make no profit, hence why we are going to stop doing it.

The wood purchased on a bulk scale still costs me approx $80, so that leaves 170 for machining and hand shaping and electronics and hardware and so forth.

At the end of all the work it just makes enough to cover the wages of someone doing the job

You need to give it some serious business thought before spending any money

This isn't in the same league as what you are considering, but I'll throw it out there, anyway.

As others have mentioned there is some serious learning curve to the CAD/CAM/CNC process. I chose to go with an entry-level that would allow me to understand what is involved without having to spend a lot of money on it. I consider it a "feasibility study". I purchased a Lobocnc kit (lobocnc.com) for about $850, to which you need to add $50 or so for a small router. It takes a few hours to put together - mostly assembly with self-tapping screws. Excellent instructions and support.

It comes with controller software specific to the machine (though it can be rewired to support Mach3). Code generation can be accomplished with a variety of software packages, but one that the kit maker recommends is Cambam - it can be used for an extended period of time on a trial basis, or can be purchased for under $300. You can use whatever CAD software you like.

The configuration of the machine is an end mill, rather than gantry style. A unique feature of the machine is that it can be used as a manual milling machine with a digital readout, in addition to being CNC controlled.

The capacity of the machine is small, as is the machine. But, it is ideal for small projects, such as guitar bridges, inlays, etc. My intention is that I'll probably reserve that machine for that sort of project if and when I go with "real" CNC equipment. In the mean time, however, it allows me to get my feet wet up to my knees, so to speak, and be better informed as I plan what is next. I figure the cost invested in the Lobo machine and associated tooling will not be wasted even after moving up to a production-level machine. But, for someone already well-versed in the triad of CAD/CAM/CNC, it won't likely be time and money well-spent.

Charles

After much thought, and a whole lot of research, this is what is in the works right now:

XzeroCNC 40X60 with 9" Z axis clearance
Leadshine 425oz Stepper Motors
Leadshine MX3660 STEPPER DRIVER UNIT
Leadshine 48VDC/10A RPS4810 Power Supply

Software:
Mach3
Mach3 2010 Screenset
Rhino3d
RhinoCAM

2.2kw 3HP Chinese (6000-24000rpm) Water cooled spindle
or
2.2kw 3HP UGRA (6000-24000rpm) Air Cooled Spindle
Hitachi WJ200 Spindle VFD

Still trying to decide on the spindle to go with. There is a HUGE price jump when you go to air cooled. Then again, I really only want to have to buy one. Nothing worse than spending good money on a tool that wasn't good enough.

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Jason McGowan
M&S Guitars
_____________________________
United States of America, looks like another silent night
As we're sung to sleep by philosophies that save the trees and kill the children....
Casting Crowns

Jason, you have pretty much described my setup in the post above. A few small differences...my 40x60 XZero Raptor has only 6" of clearance, I'm using a Gecko 540 for control and I use the standalone Visual Mill instead of RhinoCAM. I have a 2.2kw water cooled spindle and Hitachi VFD but they arrived just days ago and I'm not done with hooking them up yet. I also have Vectric's VCarve Pro and find myself using it all the time for 2.5D CAM (usually after drawing the part in Rhino) as it so simple to use.

I'm at work and need to sign off but feel free to ask questions!

Scott

Just as an update - I have now in my possession a brand new Kflop that will be replacing my parallel port just as soon as I can get a couple projects out the door.

As soon as I get back up and running under Mach 3, I start work on fully firing Mach 3. I lost too many parts thanks to that garbage.

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

Congrats JMC That looks great!

What happened Andy. I have had a few problems but think it is my own limitations with the settings in Mach3

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Ken

I ran a really large program, over 700k lines and got random stalling. Turning off the toolpath preview made the problem go away but, that's still unacceptable behavior.

Mach 3 with a smooth stepper or Kflop might work out ok but I've just had enough of the random bugs and so forth.

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

Congratulations, Andy. Let me know if you need any help, and if you don't then let me know when it happens! I'm on and off the forum these days, check in every couple weeks, so you might need to email!

On top of the other perks, once you've got the KFLOP running it's really easy to mix and match components as you upgrade. I think I'm going to be making a custom machine for my start-up based on a KFLOP in the next month or so...need a lot of little very precise prototypes (iterative) on a schedule no shop could match, and I haven't done the mechanical mods to put the linear motors in my new machine yet.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

Thanks Bob, I'll definitely be calling if I run into any issues. I've got to get together a BOM for the control box and then hopefully kick it off within the next couple of weeks. I'm thinking of adding encoders just in case. Tom from Dynomotion also says that steppers actually give better performance running closed loop with his system.



I wanted to elaborate on this - it wasn't truly random stalling. It was repeatable stalling at random points in the program. e.g., during a simple facing operation at a lowly 150ipm, the machine would stall at line 47 every time. Turn off tool path preview, no stalling.

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

I put in my order to XzeroCNC yesterday, and should be taking delivery of my 40X60 Raptor in about 3 weeks..

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Jason McGowan
M&S Guitars
_____________________________
United States of America, looks like another silent night
As we're sung to sleep by philosophies that save the trees and kill the children....
Casting Crowns

Very Nice Jason, I would like to come over and look see when it arrives.

Mike

_________________
I'm outside looking in, just farther from the window than most.

Good luck.

I'm about to set up such a system here- I'm making a small machine out of a high precision linear stage which came with steppers AND linear encoders. And using a KFLOP (and KSTEP, which'll be new to me). Won't be much of a guitar builder's machine, 8"x8" process area, but it'll be magic for its designed usage.

I'll send some feedback once I get the thing put together. Unlike my other projects, this one is work so it'll be done in a couple weeks.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

That would be great. I've actually been considering completely re-doing my control box with a Kstep/Kflop combo. To add encoders, I'll need to add some sort of opto-isolator board. I've found a 16 channel board for $100 or these: http://numato.com/opto-isolator-breakout#comment-169 that are only $5 a piece. Kstep would give me all the I/O I need for everything but, I'd have to either scavenge my old control box for the power supply etc. which would put my machine out of order during the rebuild or, I'd have to spend more money to build a complete box.

I'm thinking that in the interest of cash-flow, I'm still going to go with a separate Kflop only box with the cheapo isolators.

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