Stew Mac Jumbo 45 Guitar Kit Build log

[Brent Dowell]

Been playing around with setting up my other guitars enough and had a decent couple of days of weather.

Opened up the box yesterday. One of the first steps in the instructions is that I need to let the wood acclimate for a week or so.

That's fine, I've got a few jigs and more shop cleaning that I need to do before I'm really ready to start.

The kit comes with a way of making a jig with cardboard cutouts for joining the sides, but I opted to buy the premade guitar mold to make it easier and more accurate for assembling things.

I figure I can either sell it off someday or use it to make more guitars.

At any rate, this marks the starting point.

 

[Vaughn McMillan]

Really looking forward to watching this build!

 

[Brent Dowell]

Ok, So been a while since I posted here, well, because I had other things going on and while not really necessary, one of the things I wanted in order to do this build was a 16' radius disk for gluing up and sanding the angles on the back of the guitar.

Since I had a CNC (The OX) IT seemed to me that I should be able to make one. Sadly, the OX wasn't big enough, but I had another machine, the CNC Originally purchased by Carol, and put together by Don that was the perfect size. I did want to do a few things to it though, using a different controller and some other things. Well, That project has been completed enough that I was able to create my 16' radius disk today!



It's hard to see in this picture, but there's about a .25" dip in the middle of that 2'x2' square piece of MDF. I used a 1" diameter core box bit to carve it out.

What this did reveal to me though is that I still have a little bit of fine tuning on the machine to do as the left side was about 1-2 mm lower than the right. Will have to do some measuring and figure out whats going on. My thought at this point is that the garage floor is un even and that since I assembled the machine I've got a bit of a twist or something going on that might be causing that front left corner to be a touch too high. A lot of ways to solve it, I just need to figure what the issue really is and then I can take care of it.