Public thanks

I want to publicly thank an occasional visitor and poster here - Kevin Waldron. A few years ago he kindly produced some templates for me in exchange for some information. I lost those files and he, unlike me, a cautious archiver recovered them for me. I had been struggling to recreate them and in 5 minutes was up and running again producing quality drawing files - please note I will be offering tenor only plans some time in the future as I expand my 'parts' business.

Kevin also inspired me to more seriously explore the opportunities of CNC based production. Just recently I have been struggling because of my PD to manipulate bindings without the help a third hand so am anticipating more future limitations. Trying to get a jump on this using CNC router technologies is a stimulating challenge and I actually think I will get to 1000 instruments with improved standards of fit and finish than I achieved at the height my pre-PD days. I cannot imagine using my excellent fret slotting machine to ver do a fingerboard again and am trying hard to make the use of a pencil obsolete...

Now who would have thought that Pete Howlett would be writing a post like this, on this forum, 7 years ago eh? You could say this is a major 'hat eating' moment

One of my good friends often says "a wise man will change his mind". She's been a cowboy for over 75 years

She's been a cowboy for over 75 years

Very good point Pete.

The use of CAD and CNC is pretty much essential in my view if you are wanting to be a full time builder and producing enough to keep food on the table.....without resorting to doing repair work that provides a cash flow for many builders. I really dislike repair work not because I can't do it. Just that there is no joy, creativity and passion in it for me.

It's certainly not cheap to get equiped. I would have close to $35K invested in CNC, tooling, work holding and Laser. The time involved in learning it and then being proficient is huge. But the time saved after those hurdles are past and the accuracy of parts produced just can't be underestimated.

Allen said:

Very good point Pete.

The use of CAD and CNC is pretty much essential in my view if you are wanting to be a full time builder and producing enough to keep food on the table.....without resorting to doing repair work that provides a cash flow for many builders. I really dislike repair work not because I can't do it. Just that there is no joy, creativity and passion in it for me.

It's certainly not cheap to get equiped. I would have close to $35K invested in CNC, tooling, work holding and Laser. The time involved in learning it and then being proficient is huge. But the time saved after those hurdles are past and the accuracy of parts produced just can't be underestimated.

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The main problem I can see is that any intelligent non woodworking individual who can learn to use CAD CAM software can produce work just as good as anybody else...Same thing has happened in music, computerised music has killed the market for talented musicians ...Guys that can't play any musical instruments just have to download the right sequenceing program and they can create an orchestra ...It's possible nowadays to take photographs of someone else's work, scan it and reverse engineer it into CAD then into G Code and reproduce it with CNC...I saw this coming way back before I made ukuleles when I built my first simple hobby CNC machines.