It's a trap!

I spent the past couple of months doing stuff around the house - which including making space to move a load of stuff out of the shed to give me a little more space :] : 

The first job I wanted to tackle was to do the fretboard inlays. Whilst I've done some inlay in the past, this would be the most significant amount I've done on a single fret board. I picked up some celluloid trap inlays from Small Wonder and set to work a week or so ago:

I think that Gibson originally used celluloid (or some more flammable version of it) in the 50's. I went for them rather than the mother of pearl slightly for authenticity reasons, slightly because they're a bit bling'ier, slightly because they're thicker and more forgiving to work with.

After double and triple checking the fret numbers (I'm sure it's an easy mistake to put them in the wrong position - probably one I'll make one day...) I marked centre lines:

And marked the position of the inlay:

Which I scribed round with a knife, scribing the position into the fretboard at the same time:

Then I set up my dremel in its jig:

And set the depth to be just shallower than a piece of the inlay. I'll creep up on the depth in a couple of passes of routing:

I hogged out the bulk of the inlay area:

And then tidied up around the edges, getting as close to the masking tape as I could:

Whilst the dremel is great to move material out of the fretboard, it isn't an accurate tool. Rather than try to straighten up the edges with it,  I use a very sharp chisel to make straight cuts down:

The router bit also couldn't reach right into the sharper corners of the inlay. I used my smallest chisel to get into the corners:

Which tightened up the rout:

And yielded a nice tight fit for the inlay piece:

I carried on working down the fretboard, here the last few inlays are marked on the tape...:

...routed out...

... and chiselled out. I accidentally got a bit close to the fret slot on the 21st fret, I'll keep an eye on that one during future stages to make sure it doesn't get damaged:

It was now time to glue in the inlays. I'll just use superglue to fix them in. I sanded the bottom of them to rough them up a bit for the glue:

And flooded each rout with CA glue before pushing the inlays in:

And the first stage of the fretboard inlays are finished:

The inlays stand a little proud of the surface. This is due to both the radius on the fretboard (so the bits furthest from the centre stick out the most) and the fact that I routed the holes half a mm or so shy of the height of the inlay blocks. 

The celluloid apparently sands nicely without losing its pattern or getting colour inconsistencies, so the next step will be to them flush with the fretboard. I'll also fill in the small gaps around the side of the inlays with sawdust and CA glue.  

Neck fitting

I ordered some trapezoid inlays which were delivered, but I forgot and left them at work over the weekend. Instead of working on the fretboard, I turned my attention towards the neck joint, which needed a little fettling to get the small gaps tightened up.

Here's the joint before starting:

It's not bad, there's a little gap on the bass side. To remove this, you need to sand down the shoulder of the neck on that side. However, once one of the shoulders is changed, you also have to start adjusting all the others (on the heel, and then the other side of the neck).

First, I attached the Fricken Laser Bean to the body, so that I'd easily be able to check that the neck was straight as the joint was adjusted:

The beam runs along the centre of the body, like so:

... And should hit the nut, right in the centre of the neck. In this case, it was (annoyingly) a couple of mm off - which gives another reason to adjust the neck joint:

This isn't really a big deal - it's a tiny amount which can be compensated by pulling the neck slightly to one side as it's glued, or by mounting the bridge *slightly* (a mm or so) off centre of the body. However, since we're adjusting the neck joint, we should be able to correct this properly.

To adjust the neck joint, you basically need to remove very small amounts of material from the neck tenon. As you do so, the angle it fits into the mortice changes slightly. You need to be careful to remove tiny of material, as each removal makes the tenon smaller, so the joint less tight. I did this in conjunction with getting the neck's "shoulders" tight against the body.

One way of getting the neck and body joint tight is to put strips of sandpaper between them, and pull the sandpaper from side to side. This way is very slow:

But eventually starts to yield results by tightening up the gap:

Another way to check which bits of the joint need adjusting is to heavily coat the end of the body in chalk:

Once the neck is then offered up to this, the bits that are touching will be white, and should be removed (by sanding or gently chiseling):

After an hour or so, I ended up with a neck that was totally flat across the top of the body:

With no gap on any side of the neck joint. Bass side:

Treble side:

 And underneath the heel:

You can see in this photo on the left that the body needs a little material removed to meet the neck properly. Not sure how that happened, likely a combination of template misalignment and the robosander bearing not quite matching the size of the sanding drum, but I'll address that shortly!

I forgot to take a picture, but the tweaking of the joint also straightened up the neck, so the Frickin Laser Beam now strikes the centre of the nut.

Fretboard radius

There's almost nothing left to do before the fretboard needs to be shaped. A couple of little tidy up jobs.

I wasn't happy with how thin the veneer had become near the truss rod access hole. It was only about 1mm thick (just covered by the veneer, after the mahogany 'bit' broke duing the drilling a few weeks back), and could easily break in the future. To reinforce behind it though, the truss rod had to be moved back.

I marked where it had to move back to:

And chiselled it out:

Once done, the truss rod moved back 5mm or so, allowing for sufficient clearance underneath the veneer to reinforce it:

I used an offcut of ebony, superglued in place and held under tension with a pencil...

This will add another millimetre to the thickness, and will substantially strengthen it.

Now, it was on to the fretboard. Here's how Matt at Texas Toast does it: link. Takes about 30 seconds :( he even says he enjoys it.  Here's how I have to do it. There's more detail on this step in my telecaster build pages.

Tape the fretboard blank to a straight edge which will be used to run the radius block along (it's a 12" radius in this instance):

Masking tape / glue up the radius block:

And start sanding. Eventually, you'll sand a radius into the entire length, starting from the outside in.

Thinks to be careful of:

1. The fretboard stays straight along its length (don't sand in one place more than any other);
2. The fretboard top edge stays parallel to the bottom along the length (don't push more heavily on one end of the sanding arc compared to the other);
3. The radius block isn't pushed down too hard on one side or the other so the 'centre' of the radius ends up not being in the centre of the fretboard. 

This took a really long time - about an hour and a half, and it's boring, slow, dusty work. Eventually, you get this:

Note how the radius block is now covered with dust all across it's width, indicating that it's making contact with the entire fretboard and so put a complete radius on.

Here's the cross sectional view of the fretboard radius:

You can buy fretboards pre-radiused from Stew Mac, but I've not found anywhere in the UK that sells them. It's worth the extra cost to save this step, although you risk not getting the choice of wood you like.

Having spent so long on the fretboard, I wanted to do something that was easy and which made a visible difference to the guitar!

I attached the neck template to the neck, and rough-cut off the excess on the bandsaw:

Then after a quick visit to the robosander, the neck has its final shape. I forgot to take any pictures, but here it is 'attached' to the body:

And a close up on the neck joint - looking much sharper now, although a little more work is needed to snug it up completely.

With the fretboard radius out of the way, there's a number of jobs which are now opened up to tackle. These include the inlay work, the fretboard binding and (eventually) the fretting. I'll be ordering some trap inlays in the week, so it's possible that that will be the next job.

Headstock Shaping

Here's the headstock from last week, unclamped. 

The eagle eye'd will notice that it's currently impossible to access the adjusting head of the truss rod, so we need an access hole of some sort through the veneer. I drilled a small hole in the veneer through to the truss rod channel underneath, and gradually enlarged it with bigger drill bits:

 Then, working with files, I got it in shape so that the truss rod would fit underneath the veneer:

Once covered, the adjuster hole will not be visible:

I then spent a little time finessing the edge of the new hole to smooth it out. This is good enough for now, I'll revisit when the guitar is finished sanded in a few months time:

The picture below illustrates the access when the truss rod is in position:

Next I moved onto shaping the headstock. I decided to make a template for the headstock from using my neck template. It was glued / taped to a piece of thick stock MDF:

And after a few minutes on the robosander, we have a finished template:

It's key to make sure this template is aligned properly - else you'll end up with a wonky head on the guitar. I spent a long time measuring and centring the template,

Even busting out the Frickin' Laser Beam to check it:

I could align the neck relative to the Frickin' Laser Beam, then align the headstock template so that the laser went straight down the middle of that as well:

The headstock template was glued, then screwed down to the headstock. The screws are located where the tuner's will go eventually, so the holes will not be seen. We took a trip to the robosander:

 And after a while, we're half done:

I left a lot of material on the neck blank to be removed by the robosander, and it was pretty slow going. I had a go with my other drill tool - the Microplane Rotary Shaper. It's a terrifying thing when up to speed. The robosander doesn't hurt too much if you accidentally scrape it, but this thing looks like it would tear out chunks:

It leaves chips rather than dust, which is nicer in the workshop:

And doesn't leave as smooth a finish. However, it removes a lot of material, quickly:

I switched back to the robosander, and finished off the headstock:

Here's the finished product:

And from the side:

There's a little more shaping needed on the top edge in the centre to match the LP style that I'm going for. The follower bearing on the sander lacks the resolution to shape them so I'll do those by hand later on.