Day 9 - Inlay Work, Part 4

Inlays eat up a lot of time, what can I say. Course, I haven't put a straight 10 hours in and cranked the whole thing out, it's been a couple hours here and there. I bet I could do this pretty quickly if I had everything planned out and all the materials on hand. Today, I tried my hand at routing the cavities. This is supposed to be the hard part.

So start off with a good sharp scribe and the inlay pieces cut out, hold down (or lightly glue) the inlays to the top of the fretboard. I held down, it turned out fine. Then scribe a good healthy line around the outside of the inlay. I say healthy because when you get to the next step it's important to have a little depth to the line and it's a pain to have to reposition an inlay to redo it.

Take a regular old piece of white chalk and color in all the lines. wipe the top of the fretboard relatively clean. This will leave a nice sharp white line outlining the inlay.

I popped 50 bucks for the precision dremel router base from StewMac. Boy is this thing nice. It's well worth it if you're doing some intricate inlay work. I bought a pack of high speed steel 1/32" straight flute routers which are about $2 each, and one carbide down cut bit at $17 each for shits and giggles to compare the two. I haven't tried the high dollar bit yet, but so far the HSS bits work just fine and I'm not as afraid to smoke them, because what's two bucks? I've gotten very nice clean edges with these. Maybe it's a different story in ebony...

Here's a pic of the leaf / branch at the end and its associated cavity. Beautiful.

And here's everything in place waiting for glue. Yeah, there are some gaps and mistakes. Here's a neat trick for ya. Do the routing on a piece of paper and save the sawdust. Put all the sawdust in an envelope at the end. Now when you glue it all together, mix the sawdust in with the epoxy. It will fill in the gaps and no one will be the wiser. Especially after you stain the whole fretboard dark brown or black. Be sure to write 'rosewood' on the envelope in case the DEA raids your house because rosewood sawdust is similar in appearance to heroin...

I'll try to give a field report on my thoughts of HSS router bits vs. carbide at some point. G'Night!

Day 8 - Inlay Work, Part 3

More sitting around, watching movies (Live Free or Die Hard) and cutting out inlays... Lovely, yes? So I've got some more flavors of abalone coming my way to do the rose in the middle. We're looking at gold, green, and figured white. Till they show up, I might start routing and gluing in the two end pieces. This is fun!

Day 7 - Inlay Work Part 2

Lots and lots of patience and work to do inlays. Fortunately when one is not allowed to move, I don't feel guilty about sitting here, watching stuff on Hulu and cutting mother of pearl pieces at my computer desk err... work bench. Anyway, here's some more close up work shots. I hope I can find the charger for my camera because I'm down to one battery and it's like 5 years old and I don't want to buy a new camera because I can't locate chargers... All right, nuff of that, here's some good action shots:

Action shot showing my setup with a jeweler's saw cutting out a section of vine with a thorn in it. I just draw those in with a pencil freehand and split the line with the saw. Pretty stinkin' easy.

Here we are in the middle of a cut. That saw can turn AMAZINGLY sharp corners. All you have to do is keep moving it up and down and rotate the workpiece slowly and it rotates in one spot.

Here's a piece of vine cut out. Don't sneeze.

And this is like 5 separate pieces cut out and laid end to end to create a vine. Leaves will come next. Two things I'm still debating. I've got some really pretty green abalone coming for the rose in the center. I don't know if I should do all white leaves or half and half. Also, I could file the ends so they fit together perfectly, or I could leave them slightly disjointed for a more wild effect. I think I actually like the disjointed look better. Either way, this fretboard will have a ton of time and work (and $$$) invested in it and will look sexy as hell when it's done.

Over and out for the night, guys, Hopefully Dio is watching us from above (or below...)

Day 6 - Inlay Work, Part 1

Oh thank God, I'm starting to make progress on my guitar again. It's been a rough month, and I've finally gotten back out in the garage-mahal to do some woodwork. You can figure that any sort of woodworking on crutches triples the effort. It's much more difficult to use a table saw balancing on one foot! Be careful lad - no more hospital time this year!!! So here's some more pics, hope you like 'em!

Here's the rosewood fretboard blank from earlier. This is resawn fresh off a slab of rosewood from Owl Hardwoods in Des Plaines, IL. This has been run over the jointer for a nice flat surface. More proper ways to do that would be to use a thickness planer or a Wagner Safe-T-Plane in the drill press. My method worked pretty well, it's consistently within .010" thickness across the whole board.

OK, I've got all the frets roughly marked out, a centerline drawn, and the taper laid out so I can rough everything in on the band saw.

Here's a tapered fretboard against my plywood mock up. Looks sexy, needs some inlays and frets!

I went for a 10" radius on this. I like a little bit tighter radius than a Gibson because I play a lot of chords and like a pretty hefty neck to wrap my fingers around. I cut the radius by using a 10" radius block from Stewart MacDonald. You can actually machine your own fairly easily if you have a router and a little creativity, but for $15 from Stewmac, it wasn't worth me jigging everything up. Sometimes it's worth it just to spring for the special tools.

To the untrained eye (or wife) this would appear to be a computer bench. However, if you take a hunk of scrap, rip a slot in it on the table saw and c-clamp it to your keyboard shelf, it's a very serviceable inlay design station.

I originally planned to do block inlays because those are pretty simple and easy to cut. When I ordered the figured mother of pearl from Stewmac, I had it in my mind it would come in like a 12"x12" sheet that I could easily cut blocks from. It actually comes in a bunch of random shaped blocks about 1in^2 each. I really couldn't cut block inlays out of these, so I thought what the hell, why not do some fancy inlay work. So it's going to be a couple of vines with figured white and green abalone. In the center, I'm going to do a real nice looking rose out of white and green. The headstock will be my logo in gold. As for the design of the vine, I've been free-handing that with a pencil on the pearl and cutting it out with a jeweler's saw. This has been a pretty efficient way to use the pearl. All the little leftover chunks become parts of the vine or thorns. Leaves are easy to cut, although I think I've snapped about 5 blades so far. At least they're cheap.

Over and out.

Rest In Peace, Ronnie!

Ronnie James Dio
July 10, 1942 - May 16, 2010

You will be missed. We await your return at the end of time when you ride forth from the Silver Mountain on a griffin carrying a sword of fire to slay the demon.

Day 5 - Headstock and Body Plans

It's finally starting to look like a guitar!!!

Now doesn't that look sexy? I love hand drawn stuff, there's nothing like it! I eventually bandsawed that whole piece out. You have to see if the balance is right and if it fits before going too crazy on expensive wood.

Here's the neck in its current form laying on top of the plan for full effect... Hot!!

Like that headstock shape! All Little Sahara design baby!

End shot, look at how beautiful that grain is!

There's a 15 degree angle on the headstock.

And from the bottom...

So at this point, (sometime early April), real life kicked in. The dog blew out his ACL and had to get surgery. There goes all my guitar funds! Shit. Then a month later, I had to get some major foot surgery, so there's another setback. Now, however, I'm getting to the point where I can start working on it again. I've started building a fret spacing jig (I'll show you how I did that soon) and have just ordered a bunch of stuff from Stewart Macdonald to do the fingerboard and finish off the neck. Once the neck's done, it will be much easier to slam out the body. Can't wait! Stay tuned for more!

Day 4 - Fingerboard Blank

Here's a setup to reduce one $16 hunk of rosewood into 3 or 4 usable fretboard blanks. That's a REALLY nice blade installed in the bandsaw there (Timberwolf if you're interested).

Also while I had everything set up I thought why not resaw the headstock top wood. So that's that nice flamed maple you saw earlier, about 1/8" thick.

Here I am gluing some new wings onto the new headstock blanks to make it wide enough.

Here's one of the trickiest bandsaw operations you can do. This is a resaw to make thinner stock. It's much easier with that wonderful blade. This saw could really use some new blade guides though. Someday I'll cough up $150 for the nice Carter guides.

Everything gluing up with the fretboard blank just laying there for effect. That block at the bottom is one of my favorite table saw tools - a 2x4 push block. Keep them fingers on the fretboard and out of the operating room!!