Renewed interest

    While airbrushing the guitar for I'm 1in5, I found myself having a renewed interest in playing guitar. My Charvel by Jackson has been sitting around for ages with no strings and my amp was less than desirable. I went to the music shop and picked up a set of new strings and had it tuned within about 15 minutes. Wow have I forgotten a lot. Well, 1 down, 1 to go. The amp. I was able to strip the amp down to the bare components as I want to make a custom box for it. I had a project in the works for myself design wise for a totally different application altogether but now it is going onto the amp. The history behind the design is a bit of a story unto itself so here goes. I was chatting with my ex wife who I still remain friends with and asked her to send me a picture that she really liked so I could show her that I can take just about any picture and make it into a vector file. She sent me the picture and away I went with it. I really liked it so I saved it to file not really thinking anything of it. A little while ago I did some work with some clear black cast acrylic and I had a bit left over. I was thinking the other day when I came across it in the shop that hey, that file would look awesome carved in this backlit with blue LED's. So away I went and modified the file a bit more to suit my tastes.

    With everything now all figured out vector wise, I needed to draw it up in 3d. With the look I was shooting for, v-carving the project would more than suffice for this one, all of the black would be carved out with a 90 degree v bit. I have a trial version of Aspire by Vectric that I've been learning with and I was quickly able to come up with what I wanted. It also happens that my best friend Jamie over at Oxenham Design is a superstar in the CNC community when it comes to this software in particular. You should really hop over to his blog and check out his work, he is an unbelievable talent. http://fromaspiretobeyond.blogspot.com/

    Everything looks exactly the way I wanted it to look so time to go and see what Jamie was up to for the day. He had the Techno CNC tied up cutting parts for a sign job but the General I-carver was free and clear. The cutting surface for that one is about 15" by 20" so it was perfect. I had to redraw the file on his laptop because the trial version doesn't save toolpaths but it only took a few minutes as I had already done the steps before. After a quick double check by Jamie to make sure depths and speeds were good, we set the cutter up, loaded up the material, and fired it up. You may want to turn the volume down before playing the video. Routering acrylic can be a bit loud.

   After the final pass was completed, there was a bit of cleanup that was required which is normal. All that was required was just dragging the flat edge of an exacto knife across the inner edges to scrape off the burred  material. To bring a crispness to the look, I used a paint brush with lacquer thinner on it to go along the edges to do a final cleanup. Doing this creates a smoother surface that is more in line with the rest of the glossy area. A quick cleanup with some Goo Gone and a buffing with a dry rag and it's all done.

    The next step will be building the custom box for the amp and setting in the blue LED's. This will sit in front of the speakers with a half inch gap to allow for air travel.

Stay creative my friends.