Last year I made Trivets for everyone on my little CNC machine. This year its candy dishes and pick trays....

Really the same thing. just scale it up or down as needed.

Step 1: Guitar Silouhettes

You start with simple silhouettes. If you want to make your own I would recommend using the Gimp's threshold tool. First convert your image to a gray scale the you can pretty much block it out easily....

I used easel to create the project files. I was inspired by their project for one of these shaped like an electric guitar. I thought an acoustic guitar would be more appropriate for my sister and brother in law....

I used the picture with the neck stub as the outer cut. I set the depth to .75 and shape to "outline". As it turns out my plaque was .758 thick. When you set the cut depth to maximum (must set stock thickness) you get a checkbox labelled "use tabs". Check this and it leaves small tabs along the perimeter so your work doesn't cut completely free and jam the bit. Since I was a bit off on the depth I had more than the tabs to remove on the first one I made.

The second one I made was cut completely through. Don't forget a sacrificial scrap of plywood under the plaque or you'll cut your table too.

Step 2: First Try

This one came out pretty good. Its their demo project. I did have to use the scroll saw to free it up. A quick cleanup on the belt sander and you cant tell the tabs were ever there.

Step 3: Now for the Acoustic Version

I used the two jpegs from step one and after setting the feed rate and bit size I exported the G-code. I dont use their sender directly even though my little machine is running GRBL and was based on their CNC machine.

This way I can also cut them on the larger machine that runs Mach 3.