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.