He's lucky.  He still HAS fingers.


A shaper....think of it like this.

A BIG router, mounted upside down in a table.   Router below, bit above the table surface.

Are you terrified yet?

You should be.

I made an improvised shaper by having a 24" by 18" slab of 7/8" thick solid aluminum plate
custom CNC machined to fit my Hitachi TR-12 plunge router (3 and 1/8th horsepower)
and I use it for a variety of guitar building tasks.  it's heavy, stable, and portable.    I clamp
the whole thing into a heavier main workbench, though, when using it for its main purpose,
which is to make matching half round dowels and half round channels in two separate
pieces of wood.     The half round is an inch and a quarter in diameter and the bits are HUGE.
The one used to make the channel weighs about twelve ounces.

Think about that.  3/4 pound of sharp, carbide-toothed steel spinning at 22,000 RPM.

Let's just say that I have some very hard and fast safety rules for running that unholy terror.

SMALL PASSES ONLY.    NEVER MORE THAN AN EIGHTH OF AN INCH AT ONCE.  

I wear heavy leather welding gloves and I won't make any cut that exposes the cutter AT ALL.
If I can see the cutter,  I won't make the cut.     I often build up extra pieces on the back of
the workpiece so I achieve this goal.    And I won't cut unless the workpiece has a solid backing
of wood behind it that's at least a 2x4's thickness.    

Of course I push the wood against the cutter's action.  I wouldn't even THINK about trying to
push the wood WITH the cutter's direction of cut.   It'd be sure to dig in and launch the workpiece
and probably pull my hand too close to the cutter.  I don't want to think about that.   Not even if I had steel mesh butcher's gloves on.   They'd lose.

I have great respect for this shaper but it does things for me that nothing else can.

It's not the tool I FEAR, though.

Let me introduce you to the one tool that puts fear in my heart every time I use it.


This:




Mounted on this:






Of course, that's ONLY done with a guard attached!


This unholy combination won't give you any warnings at all.  Running a disc equipped
with chainsaw teeth at 14,000 RPM,    if you attack wood with it edge-on,  like you
would with a chainsaw,  you literally can't push it through the wood fast enough to slow
or stop the blade.   Think of it this way:   Here's 14,000 RPM or so and the max blade
speed of a chainsaw is the equivalent of maybe 3000 RPM at the very maximum.


I never use this edge on.  I use it to carve guitar tops and backs and it turns the
job into a ten minute adventure instead of a full day's worth of hard hand carving.
A dragging stroke allows me to have a lot of control over material removal, but
it's still hellishly fast at turning wood into chips.

I FEAR this tool.   I wear my welding gloves when using it,  won't even THINK about
using it without the blade guard,  and only use it with the second handle attached
and I won't run it without both hands firmly gripping the tool and even when I shut it off,
I don't take either hand off it until the blade has come to a complete stop.

This is one hell of a scary tool,  but it's essential.  I'm not patient enough to carve guitars
by hand.   I'd have stopped making them after my first one otherwise.

Here's the first guitar that I used this tool to do the initial carving on:





The tools that scare me the most are the tools that are most important to me as a guitar builder.

CJ

I am familiar with the sawstop system.

In fact,  I exchanged some rather heated emails with the inventor and owner of the SawStop company.

Why?   Because that asshole was trying to con Congress into making a law that would make his product a MANDATORY piece of equipment on EVERY table saw sold in the US.

The problem is that his patent is comprehensive enough that there's really no way to make a competing product that does what it does, that is, stop the blade and retract it,  VERY fast, without running afoul of his patent rights.

I have a very, very big problem with someone who tries to not only FORCE me to buy his product whether I want to or not (because it's included on a product I need to buy and it can't be ordered without it) but more importantly,  I have an even greater problem with someone who tries to get
congress to legislate a monopoly for him.

I told Mr. Sawstop this in no uncertain terms.  

CJ

Quoted: omg, you make guitars cmjohnson?!?!? I have been wanting to do that for a long time now.  I even bought that big Ultimate Lutherie book. Any advice?

Uh,  sit down and wait until that feeling passes!  


It's fun work.  It gets more fun as you get better and better at is.   The only problem is that it's
hard to make any money at it.  After all, your customers are GUITAR PLAYERS.   Meaning,
people who'd be homeless if they didn't have girlfriends!  

It's hard to make money off of people that have none.

Most of my learning was trial and error, plus I picked up and closely examined THOUSANDS of
guitars and learned what made good ones and what made bad ones.   I try to leave the bad features out, like Grover tuning machines.  

I started with cheap copy guitars,  started replacing parts on them, including eventually replacing
the plywood bodies with solid wood bodies that I made myself, and that of course led me in the
direction of making them from scratch.    Once I did that,  i was totally hooked.

Check out my photo gallery here at arfcom.  Some guitar pics have no thumbnail pic or descriptive name, so click on all pics to find them all.

CJ