Fret board started

Category: Guitar building

I've made a start to the fret board. The wood is a piece of iron bark, 8mm thick. It came from a floorboard in a demolition.

I decided to route the nut and cut the frets while the piece was still off the guitar. This way if there were any stuff ups (and there were), they would likely happen on the edge of the board, and be cut away later.

It took three attempts at cutting the slot for the nut before I was happy enough with it. I then spent about half an hour cutting fret slots by hand. I suspect my right forearm is going to look like Popeye's by the end of this project.

You can see in the pictures that I've slipped with the saw on a few frets (was getting a bit tired by fret 22!). A light sand has fixed that up.

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Next clamped the fret board to the neck, and went at it with a trim router bit. It came out reasonably well. One side is near perfect, the other shifted around a bit so it has a few bumps that I'll have to take out carefully.

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Still need to finish off the edge near the body, and then cut some fret markers and insert them, then do a radius curve on the fret board and glue it on.