i’ll ask Chris for some advice and share. he’s built a bunch of different guitars, so i’m sure he’s buying things piecemeal and putting what he wants in each.
i know the bodies he’s just picked up in different places (like ebay). we started with a couple of cheap ones (like $40 for the body blank) so if something happened when we did engravings, it was a low-risk.
i haven’t measured other bodies yet, but a telecaster body fits comfortably inside
it’s definitely a lot less stable. it’s going to be screwed into a 1.5" thick slab of wood, so that will help . i think it’s really important to think about how you’re going to use a piece.
also, while this is a little unstable, it’s also 1/16 acrylic. if you did the same engrave in a 1/8 or thicker, it would be a lot more stable. 1/16 is already a very flexible piece of material.
it’s from a seamless tile that i got from Adobe stock. but with modifications after creating the shape, rasterizing it and pulling it into photoshop to work with levels to get the right contrast. i had several variations and engraved 1" squares to test which contrast and setting combo got me what i wanted. started with 3 squares at different levels of contrast (left being close to the original pattern and right being the most contrasty).
Chris told me this is the kit he started with. And the Maximo guitar is the okume kit. He’s bought a few, so he sometimes mix and matches electronics. But it’s safer to buy a matched body/neck kit for fit.
We did run into a fit problem with the pick guard. The kit didn’t use a standard 8-hole dimension. It’s juuuust a little longer. And I didn’t have the guitar here to measure/check, so I measured it against my tele, which is standard (not a knockoff kit). So I’ll be redoing it. Working from home this week, so just need to find a no phone call gap for 2 hrs to re engrave. Adapting and double checking those measurements against the original pick guard.
Awesome, thank you. It’s not really in the budget right now but I will try there first when I get some income. Hopefully the glowforge will help with that issue.
I am working on my first guitar engrave for a friend, it’s an older guitar but still I would hate to mess it up. Would you mind sharing your settings? I am going to be engraving the body and the pick guard.
this is a 3D style design with grayscales in it and i used the 3D engrave style of engraving. but your settings will really depend upon your design. i’ve done other 3D engraving that had completely different settings to work. if i go dig up the settings i used here, they’re not likely to work for you unless you’re using 1/16" acrylic with a very similar gradient design.