The Padauk (Padouk? Padook?) Fender: The Other Side

Milling the first side of something is easy.  But what do you do for two sided pieces?  Turns out, my friend was well versed in this, and has a great blog post about how this process works.  The short version of it is designing dowel holes into your project on the first side and making them relative to the model, then milling the placements for those into your spoilboard for the second side.  It's hard to wrap your brain around - I did it wrong a few times before being corrected, and I'm still confused.

Once those holes are milled, dowels go into your stock, then into the board, and then the stock gets bolted back to the spoilboard, and you're ready to go.  At this point, you find out how accurate you are if your holes appear in the right place in areas that go all the way through.  I didn't realize CNC was so stressful.  

The chips didn't help ease the stress of not knowing if my design was aligned or not.  Ack

The second side started with the pockets, just like the first.  Because the tool had to have a lot of reach, the dust collection again wasn't super effective, but that was fine.  

We waited and watched over the machine while it did the pocket pass to make sure when it cut down, it matched up to the other side.  Not only did we have to wait and hope, it makes a terrible sound when it gets through, and terrible sounds on the mill are generally not a good thing.  The first pocked matched up, and everything went smoothly from there, including cutting the outline and leaving the tabs in place.  

For the finishing pass, we hit an interesting snag and had to restart the pass after lowering the tool coordinates.  The ball end mill was hovering just over the area it was supposed to clear, but once we lowered it by about .5mm, it was mostly smooth sailing.  There are some toolpaths I'll have to sand out, but that's easy. 

Done!

Finally the second pass was finished.  Everything was checked over and the screws were removed from the stock.  As the words "hey these tabs held everything in place" really well came out of my mouth, the tabs snapped and the body fell out of the stock.  Oops.

Thankfully Padauk is a hardwood, so a quick run over with sandpaper took the scuff out.  

Not to shabby, but a little tabby.

Next, I dremeled the tabs off of the side of the guitar body.  There is a tiny seam, meaning our dowels were just the slightest bit off, but it's barely noticeable and will sand out.  From here, it's a little bit more sanding, then I'll fill the grain with some zpoxy and give this a tru-oil treatment.  

Turns out Padauk has a lot of different spellings, and I don't know which is correct.