Making a Guitar Stand with a CNC Machine

This project is great for people that have already a little bit of experience with CNC milling.

As the parts are relatively long for this project, a good clamping is very important!  We recommend using at least 1 clamp (or screw) every 10 cm to reduce the vibrations and enhance the quality of your surface finish.

The stand is made out of 2 identical legs, each made out of 3 parts: Long vertical - Short vertical & Horizontal. 

If you feel comfortable with Fusion, you can also create a new Gcode from the CAD body to make the legs in 1 contour operation. You could for example use plywood to make the stand out of two 1-piece legs which would go much faster and reduce the cost of the stand. 

Each leg is made out of 3 pieces and thus 3 Gcodes. 

• Long vertical needs a 40 x 378 x 20 mm stock
• Short vertical needs a 168 x 46 x 20 mm stock
• Horizontal needs a 289 x 61 x 20 mm stock.
  
  

We used beech wood for our stand, but you can use any material you want for this project. 

Tips 

1) Oversize your stock (+20 mm at each side) to be able to secure it properly to the spoiler board. Securing it firmly to your spoiler board will not only avoid your piece to fly around, but will also reduce the amount of vibration during milling and by means improve the surface finish.

Go check our “Feeds and Speeds explained” article to learn more about the influence of parameters on your milling results.

2) If you choose solid wood like us, you need to pay attention to the grain direction! Your grain should be parallel to the long edge of each piece you are milling. Orienting your grain in the other direction would break the structural integrity of the stand, and it would break quickly when you use it.

Good grain direction	Bad grain direction

We used a 6mm 3-flute flat end mill for this project. You can buy one directly on our webshop.

If you’d like to edit the Autodesk Fusion 360 project (to use another end mill for example) you can download it here.

Each leg is made out of 3 pieces and thus 3 G-code files are needed for each leg.

Long vertical

This piece is made out of 2 operations:

• Drilling holes for the rope that will keep the two legs together and the dog bones. The spindle should be set to run between 20 000 and 25 000 rpm as the plunge feedrate is 1 000 mm/min. We use a 3 mm pecking to allow chips to be evacuated correctly.
• A 2D contour will leave a 0.3 mm axial stock to leave while a “-0.1 mm” radial stock to leave will create enough play to fit the piece into “ Horizontal”. The spindle should run between 20 000 and 25 000 rpm as the feedrate is 2 000 mm/min  with 3 mm passes.
  
  

Short vertical

This piece is made out of 2 operations: 

• Drilling holes for the dog bones. The spindle should be set to run between 20 000 and 25 000 rpm as the plunge feedrate is 1 000 mm/min. We use a 3 mm pecking to allow chips to be evacuated correctly. 
• A 2D contour will leave a 0.3 mm axial stock to leave while a “-0.2 mm” radial stock to leave will create enough play to fit the piece into “ Horizontal”. The spindle should run between 20 000 and 25 000 rpm as the feedrate is 2 000 mm/min  with 3 mm passes.
  
  

Horizontal

This piece is made out of 2 operations: 

• Drilling holes for the dog bones. The spindle should be set to run between 20 000 and 25 000 rpm as the plunge feedrate is 1 000 mm/min. We use a 3 mm pecking to allow chips to be evacuated correctly. 
• A 2D contour will leave a 0.3 mm axial stock to leave. The spindle should run between 20 000 and 25 000 rpm as the feedrate is 2 000 mm/min with 1.5 mm passes.

Download Autodesk Fusion 360 and G-Code files here