February 2023 Update

Posted on February 28, 2023 by Scott French

February started with a bang and ended with a whimper. All of January's forward progress carried over to the new month with several objects being modelled and machined. I refined the pickup cover design a bit and also moved into the recessed pickup rings. From there I made some good progress on a two-piece knob design. Here's a short video showing how quick you're able to take an idea from paper to a physical object with all these awesome modern tools.

If you'd like to see some more detail here's a larger version.

Somewhere in all that I even started on the SF3 body design. So far I haven't been happy with any of the results, but it is cool to at least see the rough shape in 3D space. One sticking point on this project is I have a lot of these old SF3co Claro Walnut body blanks that I really want to use, but because of the tight nature of the raw boards I extracted these from I was forced to rough cut out the shapes right away. That makes work holding and indexing on the CNC a lot more effort, so I have been trying to learn how to approach all that with some new side/toe clamps. I also grabbed a new surfacing bit so I can easily flatten large areas of the body more quickly. I'm looking forward to trying these out soon!

The Whimper

A few weeks into February I started feeling pretty run down. I continued pressing on, but with work and family obligations I had to take a break on burning the midnight oil on guitar projects. Maybe I was pushing a bit hard through early February, but really I think this tiredness had more to do with my kids bringing home bugs from school. Edison our youngest was very sick during this time and eventually it caught up with Roland. I thought I might avoid getting sick since I was doing my best to rest, but toward the end of the month it got me too and I went down hard.

Just as I went down a big winter storm rolled in. I've been in bed fighting a fever and coughing my guts out while the snow slowly accumulates outside. So that's where we end the month, just starting to feel a bit better while we're on day two of waiting for the power company to turn our electricity back on! Wish us luck, and I hope to be back next month with a more productive update.

Two more quick notes

I made a mid-month update to the website earlier in February to allow for double columns of images throughout the Journal section. I think this helps a lot when there's a bunch of images and you had to scroll so far down to see them all. This also helps balance the page content with the images and differentiates the "thumbnail" and full sized "lightbox" images a bit more. And last but not last, Juno turned six month old this month. She's getting huge, just as you'd expect.

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