Fret Work

Not my or many luthiers favourite thing to do, I just don't do it often enough to be that good at it. After watching Charles Fox do it and taking notes I figured I would have a better chance of getting it right.

I decided to try semi-hemispherical fret ends, the result was not the best semi-hemispherical fret end but probably the best I have done for fret work. So I'll take that.

Looking more and more like a guitar...

Sanding & Pore Filling & Deja Vu

So I have been doing stuff.. I had "issues" with the neck angle on the parlour guitar once everything was glued up so had to remove the fretboard and remake it as well as sort of the neck angle. The neck angle is now perfect and the fretboard almost remade, it just needs frets. I also took the opportunity to do a bit of headstock inlay on the parlour and that worked out well.

This should look familiar

First try inlaying in anything other than ebony

I also did the finish sanding on Rick's tenor and did the first coats of pore fill on the back & sides, they will probably need two more coats.. I'm using z-poxy as a pore fill I like it as it is pretty forgiving..

Nice clean & simple looking

and the back

Attaching the Neck & Fretboard

Things are moving along and really starting to look like an instrument now, the neck & fretboard are attached to the body (bolt on mortise & tenon joint) and the next step is to carve the neck.

The bridge is also made but will not be permanently attached until after finishing the Mandocello..

Finishing the Fingerboard

So a few posts ago I cut the slots in the fingerboard. Now it needs to be tapered to the correct shape bound and the marker dots and frets installed.

It is rough tapered on the band saw and fine tuned with a apron plane or a block plane whichever is handy.

Then the fingerboard is bound, I am not a big fan of the look of unbound fingerboards, I don't like seeing the fret tangs, I know it is common in classical guitars but not something I like. Usually I use a contrasting wood for binding but this time since I am keeping the decoration simple I just used some 1mm strips of ebony I had ripped off the fingerboard before slotting.

The dots are installed and finally the frets.. With a bound fingerboard the tangs of the frets must be removed from the end of the fret where it overhangs the binding as there is no sot in the binding to receive the tang. There are special made nippers to do this or various contraptions to hold the fret while you file off the tang (nippers don't work on stainless frets) But I just took some cheaper common nippers and ground a slot in them so the fret sits flat

A half done fret and nippers,
you can just see the slot ground into the bad of the nippers

Close up of fret

Completed fingerboard with gold mother of pearl marker dots

Cutting Fret Slots

I have done this several ways, when i first made instruments I measured and hand cut each slot, it was a tedious process and easy to make errors when you are dealing with fractions of a millimeter. I think moved to a manual system from LMI that used templates for various scale lengths. This was a much more accurate system but still a bit slow.. So today I started using a special blade in my table saw and a little home made jig and the templates form the LMI manual system.. Works great and is very quick and accurate, takes about 1 minute to slot a fretboard.

The fret board is attached to the template with double sided tape and just held against the jig which has an indexing pin.

Table saw, jig and template

Indexing pin

In position to cut slots

One minute later

Nice and accurate

Blade with stiffeners

Cutting Fret Slots

For a change I cut the fret slots in the fingerboard the other day. I use the LMI fret slotting jig. I'm thinking of switching to a table saw jig but this method works just fine for now.

The LMI Jig

Does a nice clean job

Finished ready to be tapered & bound