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I just love the Telecaster-like shape for guitars (not the only shape I like though) and after my shop was ready with a CNC, and with the experience of having already built a  Telecaster pretty much using hand tools under the supervision of Richard Baudry (near Lille), it was time for me to embark on my own journey, making more guitars, for my own use and for the pleasure of making them.

I'm using Vectric Aspire, a software that provides both good (a set of 3D CAD and modeling SW tools (but may be not the most complete) and the capacity to simulate and create tool paths for pretty much any CNC. This SW came with my CNC.

A first body model/shape

Real Size!

... And Real Wood!

Working on the/a fretboard...

:-(... Well... that didn't go as planned. First I forgot to rotate the model so it would fully fit the CNC bed. No damage but that's a reminder of how careful one needs to be with these machines.

Then, and as my blank was not wide enough for an easy clamping, I broke a bit when it met a screw. Had to stop everything, re-caliber the positioning and Z.  All paths seem OK and my fretboard was coming out with a beautiful 16" radius all carved until I went to carve the dot inlays... and obviously, these were not at the right spot.
Still at this time I have no idea as what is/was the cause of the problem. One fretboard blank wasted... I have to make other ones.

So... more later  - It's a long learning process.

New Neck! (same 200y old blond walnut wood)

Installation of the dot inlays

The diameters for the dots are 8mm, I got some aluminum tube with 8mm external diameter and 6mm interior. I placed small plastic (pearl looking) dots in them after cutting small sections of 2mm long. Superglue in the wood holes, hammered in the inlays composed of aluminum+'pearl', and then lots of grinding by hand to get back to the neck surface level, and a sanding pass at 320 grain, using my new 16" radius sanding block.
Next steps: sanding at 400 grain, and then 600... Pfff! And only then the frets can go in.

Guitar Body (ies)!

I started (as shown above) with a slightly slanted TeleCaster style body. I really love that shape.

Then with my work on the neck and a Lyon skyline on top of it, I thought maybe it'd be cool to create a series of guitar based on cities, starting with Lyon, of course... So I went on and grabbed a High-resolution scanned city map of Lyon, and began to play with it, tracing the bitmap to get vectors I could carve following the surface of the body (and its arm-rest section). Easier said that done.... It took me two days to find a secure, repeatable process to create a vectorized file to map onto the body shape! But I nailed it :-)

Back to carving the Lyon version. This series will be called "citycaster". I can do Lyon (first), London, Paris, etc. etc. guitars or bass guitars. So I put together a blank of wood using some leftover nordic pine wood (not a good choice I know) to test the carving process and see what the result can be. If the guitar looks good, I'll make a real version with Alder, Basswood, or  Poplar, depending on what I can find. I'll try to stay away from too heavy/too hard woods for telecaster-style bodies.

Carving on CNC is a long process and even more if you have (like in my case) lots and lots of small vectors to carve. Below are some pictures, showing the progress. I also made a small video about it.

Color and satin finish is the choice... For several reasons... -1- I did have some dark blue lying around, -2- the wood is not that great and I had to cover a small error which will disappear under the paint, -3- 'cause I think it will look good with silver HW.

After the first coat of acrylic varnish. Still needs full curing and sanding, and 1 or 2 more rounds of varnish+sanding before a final coat

After a small crisis (lost my PC - not my data!) for a yet to understand reason... No audio, then video playback locked, then ... no restart or shutdown (had to HW force it). 

Result : I performed a partial reset of the OS, and that didn't do it. 

A FULL reset to initial manufacturing state, plus hours of updates (even with a 5Gb/s internet link) plus 1 full day to re-install all my apps and [thank you my trusty weekly backups] my data, I'm back to life (digitally meant of course). BTW the error was in fact due to an AVG (antivirus)  update that interfered with the PC audio drivers. AVG is now gone, forever, and replaced with another antivirus program.

My finished guitar

I finished my Citycaster#001 !!!  Two more coats of acrylic finishing did a decent job, but in the future I will not use this. I'll go for something harder, that sands better when cured and in the long run will provide better protection to the guitar. I also mounted the strings and had to add a small (1mm or so ) shim under the neck to have the fretboard and strings at the right height compared to the guitar bridge. Not surprised with that as my neck blank thickness was closer to 20.5 mm than the  22mm I aimed for at the begining.

Then some electronics (that was easy, two pickups). I installed a standard neck pickup I had left from a Dean Zelinsky Dellaterra guitar and the bridge pickup is a double blade small humbucker that gives surprisingly good results/sound for its $12 selling price. I mounted it with a coil split too to have that single coil sound when needed. A volume pot, a tone pot, and a 3way splitter, which I may change for a 4way (adding a series pickup position) in the future. The tone pot carries the coil split switch. Really nothing fancy, but the sound (and a good one) is there.

On the pictures below: I'll change the golden knobs for chrome plated ones, just waiting for them to arrive by postal service.

Have questions? comments? - All are welcome. I'll happily share files if you need them with a good reason.