Guitar Logistics: S906_3 Neck and Fretboard work

Monday, March 14, 2011

S906_3 Neck and Fretboard work

A picture of some crazy figure from the fretboard. The challenge is to get as much of this in the board as I can.

This should be the last passes for my custom made 16 inch radius router bit. I am replacing it with a Grizzly fretboard sander thing...custom conical radii here we come. I use double sided tape to hold the fretboards to a square 4x4. The center line lets me flip the board and make a second pass without moving the fretboard. While this works very well it is not as accurate as I like and still leaves plenty of hand sanding at the end.

Flip the whole thing and do the other side.

I want the crazy spots in the fingerboard to line up with certain fret slots. Preferably somewhere there normally would be a dot. When I moved the yellow spot to the 12th fret I lost some really crazy stuff in cut-off. So I moved the yellow to the 3rd fret and it put some other crazy stuff at the 15th.
Next thing to do was to calculate the offset of the index pin from the slot. This allows me to properly position the figure on the fretboard for the area between the frets. A couple of measurements is all you need.

I wax my trussrod threads before installing them to keep glue and grit out. I am using an old pickup potting crock pot. Keep the wax under 150 degrees as it is flammable.

Half a seasons worth of fretboards.

Profile the fretboard within a mm of the neck size for gluing. Then use the violin fretboard clamps to get a look at it.

Before we glue anything up I have to sort out the headstock trussrod area. I am going to try something different and if it doesn't work I will just put a trussrod cover on it. Basically I am going to machine a very clean tapered hole for the trussrod wrench to fit in. It might look good enough to not need trussrod cover. I did this with a rat tail file chucked in the hand drill.