Neil Haynes, a cabinet maker and musician, started Haynes Guitars three years ago, with a love for woodworking and a passion for music combining the two and manufacturing his own guitar bodies and necks for other guitar makers from the UK and Europe seemed the logical progression.

At W14 Neil decided to take a massive leap and take his business to the next level and purchase a CNC from the Felder Group, a profit H08 from the Format-4 range. 

“I have been making guitars by hand for 25 years, I had no knowledge of CNC and I thought that Felder would be the best for me. As a customer new to CNC, I knew I would need a lot of help and it has always been there, I did the training and learnt the basics, from there anything else I needed I picked up via the telephone support – and thanks to the help from the staff at Felder Group UK I was able to pick up it up easily.”

Since then Neil has purchased two more machines from Felder’s Hammer range the A3-41 planer thicknesser equipped with the spiral-POWER silent cutterblock and the K3 basic panel saw. 

When talking about his machines Neil says: “With the CNC, accuracy is key, it works great with the Alphacam software and I can make up to five bodies at a time, it’s 100% accurate time after time” 

He goes on to say: “I couldn’t go back to a normal cutterblock on my planer thicknesser now that I have used the silent-POWER one – it is so quiet, so accurate and the blades are so easy to change. The sliding table saw is superb. It’s still very industrial and the sliding table makes the small machine very powerful.” 

Neil finished by saying: “I have used machines at a much higher price that are not as user-friendly and simply not as good.”

See Neil’s work at www.haynesguitars.co.uk and www.guitarandbassbuild.co.uk.