Fretboard shaping

There's not many jobs left to do on this guitar, but they're all quite intimidating. Left is the top shaping, neck carve, binding and finishing the fretboard.

I started on the fretboard. It was too long, so I trimmed it off:

Next up, the inlay gaps had to be filled. They weren't huge, and they're about as good as I've done, but there were still little gaps around the inlay:

I sanded off a load of dust from an offcut of the same wood, and filled up the gaps with it.

Then flooded the area with thin CA - the thin stuff wicks nicely into the gaps, sealing in the dust and filling all the gaps up. Once done, it looks horrible, and you'll think that you've destroyed your lovely fretboard:

To get rid of all the dried on superglue and excess dust, I had to use the fret radius block again. I re-attached the fretboard to the radius jig,

And went at it with the radius block CA is really hard when it dries, and it eats through and clogs up sandpaper. It took a number of changes of paper, and an unexpectedly long time to grind all the excess CA off the inlays:

This isn't the final finish. There's still more low grit sanding to go on the fretboard as I expect to knock it or scratch it when I do the binding on it. I stopped when most of the CA was gone - you can see that the gaps around the inlays have now gone, and that they should look pretty tidy in the end!

Next up was to shape the fretboard to the right size - at the minute it's rectangular. First I trimmed the bridge end of the board to size:

 And spend a little while marking out exactly where it should be positioned on the neck template - it's crucial that it's both square (frets at exactly 90 degrees to the centre line) and positioned right relative to the nut:

I glued / taped it down to the template. I'm going to use a router to shape it, but you can see from the photo that I do not want to follow the shape of the template all the way down, as I'll make a tenon out of it! I mark this with tape, so when I'm routing I know where to stop:

Next up, I decided to make a jig to hold the router. I secured the router gate onto a few bits of MDF:

Which would hold the router at the right height, and allow me to move the neck against the follower bearing, underneath the router. This has the great advantage that the router will not move from 90 degrees to the work piece which can happen fairly easily and which will instantly ruin this fretboard:

From the side:

After shaping, the fretboard has now reached it's final shape. Next up will be to bind it: