Hello all,
I’m a Seattle based violin maker just beginning to explore the world of CNC. I have received most of my Elite woodworker, just waiting on the redline spindle and vfd. I got the QCW stand, as it seemed like one of the easier approaches for leveling/coplanarity, and am excited to take my first steps in this very cool evolution in manufacturing.
I have been slowly learning Rhino on my own, and my goal is to be able to model the complex shapes of violin arching so that I can use the CNC to mill my plates close to finished and then finish the job with traditional hand tools (gouges, little planes, scrapers).
At this stage, I’m a total neophyte. I’m doing my best to learn about the tooling, feeds and speeds, and the like and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. I hope I won’t be too much of an annoyance asking questions here as I discover things that haven’t been covered before in a way that I can understand.
One thing I’m wanting to try is using my machine to make very smooth, tight joints. Traditionally, when preparing the wood for a spruce violin belly, we’d flatten the surface which will eventually glue to the ribs, then use a large bench plane to shoot the joint surfaces. Set very finely, we’ll take a few passes on each joint surface of the book matched plate billet until we can hold them together and see that they fit perfectly without gaps or twist. Some colleagues have really finely tuned power jointers which will do this job well enough to skip the hand plane step. One colleague I know uses his CNC with a jig to use it like a jointer, where he slides the wood across the jig in which the bit is spinning.
My thought is to have the wood held in a jig and have the CNC move along the joint surface, taking off say 0.1 mm with each pass.
My question is, for the smoothest, most perfect joint surface, is more flutes better? Or is there a point of diminishing returns?
Anyway, thanks to all of you for your kindness and wisdom!