And she goes down as twelve.

[BluesBlooded]

This will be the second incarnation of my TW1 design.

The first was this one.

https://www.tdpri.com/threads/tw1-build.934764/

I will adjust this design to make a 12 string version.

Some of the characteristics

25 in scale
7.25 radius Richlite fretboard
Yellow birch and walnut body. Natural or Amber tinted, not decided yet.
Handwound P90 pickups
Gotoh 12 string style bridge
Wilkinson ez-lock tuner 6+6
Aluminum inlays
Aluminum pickguard
Solarez I can't believe it's not lacquer finish on the body.
Neck finish will either be boiled linseed oil or solarez.
Maybe a TW F-hole on the upper part.

 

[Ripthorn]

Love the design! I have not heard of the Solarez before. Have you used it previously? I just read about it and it is intriguing, for sure! There are a lot of pro's to it, so I would love to know all about it.

 

[RatBug]

I saw something about Solarez yesterday and it sounded familiar, so after seeing this I looked it up and found that the reason for that is that is was one of the first UV cure fly tying glues, head coatings I used a few years ago.

 

[BluesBlooded]

I've heard of Solarez from a Highline guitars videos a couple of months ago and was intrigued but discarded the idea for my Lucille build.

I had forgotten about it then yesterday I saw another video that reminded me I wanted to try it.

One thing that was bugging me was that I did not want to use my HVLP gun to spray it.

I sure like the idea of not waiting a couple of weeks for lacquer to cure or spending three to four days spraying it.

In this video, Chris is using a rag to fake an oil finish. I decided that this 12 string project was a perfect project to finally try it.



We'll see

 

[crazydave911]

OOOOOOOO I just LOVE a 12 string!

 

[R. Stratenstein]

OOOOOOOO I just LOVE a 12 string!

View attachment 627681

Yeah, me too. Especially the way Andre builds guitars!

 

[BluesBlooded]

Thanks Dave, this will be my first 12 string build. I hope it turns out great.

Obviously, my original neck design will not be useful. So here I go redesigning the neck. 48mm at the nut. The width at the heel was dictated by the bridge and it's position.

I will use my Lucille headstock as a starting point

Here is how I build my neck in Rhino 5

I start by drawing all the required curves for the neck shape I’m going to do.

I then draw the neck profile curves at the 1st and 12th fret and cross lines where I want the neck profile to end and where the transition to the headstock and heel will start.

I run the SWEEP 2 RAIL commands and select the two profile curves and cross lines along the neck

Select Do not simplify and click OK which creates the surface

I then select the top of the neck curve and create a surface with the planar curve

I create all the surfaces with planar curves for the headstock face and bottom and LOFT for all the sides surfaces

I also join every surface to each other to make sure that they connect correctly. If not, I inspect the curves of the last created surface since that is generally where the problem lies. I fix, redo the surface rejoin until they join.

After every easy surfaces are joined, I’m left with the hardest part, the headstock and heel transition

I create two lines that join both area. I then use the rebuild command to add points to the line.

 

[BluesBlooded]

Thank you Rick for the vote of confidence.

Once this is done I show the control points with the F10 key

I use the two inside control points and move them around until I reach the transition curve I’m looking for.

When I’m happy, I create curves for the sections I will be building. I then use the PATCH command to create the surface.

I join the new surface to the rest of the neck to make sure it works.

Do the same process at the other end

Once the neck is completed, I will use the ShowEdges command and make sure I have 0 naked edges. I will use this command a couple of times in the process to be sure that all edges are joined properly. This will help figure issues as they arises.

I thin up the headstock by making a surface that I will use to trim the headstock

I then join the new surface to the neck

Last thing to do is to Fillet the heel with a radius of 3.175mm which will match my 6.35mm cutter that will do the neck pocket.

And voilà, neck completed

It is now ready for the CAM operation of generating the GCode for the CNC. But before, I will tackle the Fretboard drawing since my original is not wide enough and does not have the proper radius.

 

[crazydave911]

Did you by chance consider a Ricky type headstock for this? There are many ways to do it that don't look like a Ricky. My first was hard because I made it a snakehead. I now use a the profile of the Dano Pro I. just kinda worried with that beautiful body there'd be neckdive. Oh well,carry on

There is a limited number of tuners that will work on these but luckily none suck lol,

Dave

 

[oldrebel]

Great looking neck, and you make it look so easy.

 

[guitarbuilder]

Thank you Rick for the vote of confidence.

Once this is done I show the control points with the F10 key

I use the two inside control points and move them around until I reach the transition curve I’m looking for.

View attachment 627747

When I’m happy, I create curves for the sections I will be building. I then use the PATCH command to create the surface.


View attachment 627748

I join the new surface to the rest of the neck to make sure it works.

View attachment 627749

Do the same process at the other end

View attachment 627750

Once the neck is completed, I will use the ShowEdges command and make sure I have 0 naked edges. I will use this command a couple of times in the process to be sure that all edges are joined properly. This will help figure issues as they arises.

View attachment 627751

I thin up the headstock by making a surface that I will use to trim the headstock


View attachment 627752

I then join the new surface to the neck

View attachment 627753

Last thing to do is to Fillet the heel with a radius of 3.175mm which will match my 6.35mm cutter that will do the neck pocket.

View attachment 627754

And voilà, neck completed

View attachment 627755

It is now ready for the CAM operation of generating the GCode for the CNC. But before, I will tackle the Fretboard drawing since my original is not wide enough and does not have the proper radius.

I'll have to look at the patch command. I used it on one of my early LP bodies but not recently.

 

[BluesBlooded]

Did you by chance consider a Ricky type headstock for this? There are many ways to do it that don't look like a Ricky. My first was hard because I made it a snakehead. I now use a the profile of the Dano Pro I. just kinda worried with that beautiful body there'd be neckdive. Oh well,carry on

View attachment 627779

There is a limited number of tuners that will work on these but luckily none suck lol,

Dave

Hi Dave, thank you for your insight, I really appreciate it.

I did not consider the Ricky type headstock.

I too I'm worried about neck dive. My original design does not suffer from neck dive and has chambers in both the upper and lower side of the body for weight reduction.

For this one I was thinking chambering only the upper portion keeping some weight in the lower body to compensate the added weight on the neck. I hope it's going to be enough.

Since I already purchased all the hardware for this build I will continue as planned hoping it won't be a colossal mistake.

 

[BluesBlooded]

Great looking neck, and you make it look so easy.

Thank you Rebel, I only show what worked. I got a few problems making the transition sections. The patch command would yield a surface that was way to big around the curves. The solution was to recreate the curves in the area. Along the way, doing split and join operation creates curve that are sometime confusing for Rhino to make surface out of. I came to understand that the best approach is to work with unaltered curves as much as possible, or, recreate some of them.

An habit I developed is joining the surface as I add them. Then I select the new surface and delete it. I know it sounds strange, but this is a quick way of knowing that they are joined or not. If they are every surface I built will be deleted from view. If one is still showing, then something is wrong. I then do an undelete with the CTRL-Z key and either fix the problem or move on to the next surface. This check takes only a few seconds to do and assures me that it's ok. I don't do it as often as I should but the showEdges command with the Naked Edges selected is very useful to see where the problem is. It will pinpoint where you need to fix issues.

One other habit I have now is to create different layers for every part I'm doing. I do a sublayer in every layer called curves that I keep hidden (turn off the bulb). So when a surface from curves is completed and I do not need the curves anymore, I take the curves and move them in the appropriate sublayer curves. This keep my work area clean and helps prevent errors.

 

[BluesBlooded]

I'll have to look at the patch command. I used it on one of my early LP bodies but not recently.

Marty, the patch command is very useful for strange portion where curves are going in every possible direction. You can select the number of points up to 255. I find that 100 in both usually gives good enough results.

 

[guitarbuilder]

Marty, the patch command is very useful for strange portion where curves are going in every possible direction. You can select the number of points up to 255. I find that 100 in both usually gives good enough results.

Years ago I used a digitizing probe to copy a real LP body I have here and it wanted to "patch" in the pickup routs on the top carve. That's the only time where I used it.

 

[BluesBlooded]

My original fretboard is useless. Not wide enough and 12 in radius

I copy the end curve and the nut curve so the length remains the same

I extend the nut curve to the width of the neck

then draw curves along the side of the neck

as you can see I intentionally stopped before the curving end. I will extend these farther than the end of the fretboard

Using the curve extend tool, I extend the s shaped curve of the end

Now I can trim the excess

and join them all together to create a planar curve for the fretboard

I can then use Extrude Planar Curve and create an extrusion of 6.35mm (1/4in)

I now have a flat fretboard

 

[BluesBlooded]

I draw a circle that has a radius of 7.25in and align the quad of the circle in the middle of the top of the fretboard

I then make an extrusion from this circle

I then use the split command and select the fretboard to split

With the extrusion tube

I then delete both the extrusion and the top of the fretboard

I use both end curves with the SWEEP 2 Rail command to create the proper radius fretboard top

That I join to the rest of the fretboard

Use the showEdges command to make sure there are zero naked edges

Show the neck and fretboard together to check for obvious mistakes

 

[BluesBlooded]

Draw lines where the fret will be located. I used the ones I had for my original TW1 since there location is the same.

I extended them so they are wider than the neck

I create extrusions from these fret curves that exceeds the fretboard thickness and width

I can then use the Intersect command that will make a curve where the extrusion and the fretboard meet.

Giving this result

I delete the extrusion since I do not need them anymore

My inlays from the original will do except for the 12th fret. I want to put a TW12 instead of TW1

As you can see below, the edges of the TW12 are sharp.

That cannot work because when I cut them on the CNC, The inside corners will have the radius of the cutter that I will use. In this case I use a 0.8mm (1/32in) router bit.

I use the Fillet Edge operation to give a 0.4mm radius to all sharp edges

Which gives this result

When I cut the pocket and the inlay itself they will match.

 

[guitarbuilder]

I like watching you use Rhino. Everybody today is using fusion360, which to me doesn't look as nice...

 

[BluesBlooded]

That command did not work well for the W

As you can see, it did not fillet the edges because the edges do not have 0.4mm of length to work with

Instead I had to redo the W

I duplicated all the edges that I needed

I used a font to create the TW12. It had some kind of fancy curves at some places that I needed to straighten

I extended them

Trimmed the excess and join them together

I then used the Fillet curve command to round all the sharp edges with a 0.4mm radius

I extruded this curve into a solid surface that will now be easy to insert in the pocket

Used the fillet edges for the 1 but had to rebuild the 2 like I did the W. They are now ready