I’ve always wanted to ask you. How forgiving is a project like this? How absolutely perfect do things need to line up?
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you mean the engraving part of the building of the electronics?
for engraving, if it’s not a full-body pattern engrave, i try to see if i can work it out that there are several pieces that work together but don’t touch. then i have more flexibility for alignment.
if it’s full body, then i put a “centerline” between the two sections with two perpendicular small cross bars and use that to align. score that line (just dark enough to mark the masking, not go thru), then engrave first half. rotate the guitar, autofocus, attempt to align visually, and then run that light score again and adjust the positioning.sometimes it’s the design in the UI, sometimes it’s the actual guitar. for horiz/vertical adjustments, i’ll move the art. if it’s rotational, especially minutely rotational, i’ll move the body itself. because one of the biggest flaws of the GFUI, imnsvho, is that rotation is by a handle and anything but precise. if i could type in 10ths or 100ths of a percent into a rotation box, i’d always adjust the art.
no matter what, sometimes things are just a hair off. if the engrave is complex, like the paisley, it’s pretty easy to adjust a tiny bit with a dremel to mask the miss. and i always miss to overlap a tiny bit vs miss with a gap, which is harder to fix. and since most of the time we daub a little watered down black paint before unmasking to darken the engrave, it gets hidden even better.
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