In 2019 I didn’t make much progress with the guitar at all, mostly because my day job kept me busy for much longer than planned. On top of that I moved both our home and my shop (into one location actually).
So it took until April 2020 that I sprung the CNC machine back to life and continued giving the guitar further shape. Here you can see it working on the neck-body joint:
![](http://www.glui.de/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_2783-1024x768.jpeg)
To properly cut the neck contour I had to go beyond the 2.5D approach and go full 3D. In a move to use more open-source software I opted for FreeCAD (also switch to kicad for PCB design recently).
3D tools have a much steeper learning curve of course, so it took me a while to come up with this first design:
![](http://www.glui.de/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/image-2-1024x699.png)
Here’s that section after some manual sanding:
![](http://www.glui.de/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/60866994126__3840F7A4-8256-40A4-A21E-4584DA7C1823-768x1024.jpeg)
While I started applying this 3D approach to the body as well, I realized that it was way too much work just to give all the edges a 5mm radius, so from there on out I went back to good old files and sand paper.
Here’s how that turned out for a section of the back:
![](http://www.glui.de/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/image-3-793x1024.png)
I also applied the manual approach to shape the head-stock. Here’s a picture of its back:
![](http://www.glui.de/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_2821-1024x768.jpeg)
With strings!
![](http://www.glui.de/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/IMG_2824-768x1024.jpeg)