Now I see why they call it "fretting"

I waited to set the frets until after I rough fit the necks to the body, and also did all the final shaping and smoothing before I set any frets. I made an error in judgment right from the start here, which gave me a genuine klong (that's a medical term for a rush of shit to the heart). I had to scramble to get back on track, but everything turned out fine.

Flush-cut fret nippers, home made. I took two seldom-used wire cutters and ground their faces halfway through the "blades." The smaller one on the left wasn't robust enough to cut the fret wire at all, but the other one worked fine. Saved about $30 with this, I think.

First, I made a complete set of frets for both guitars, without bending the wire to any radius, undercutting for the binding and some overlap to trim. I thought the curve was so slight I would have no problem pressing them in to fit the curve. Boy, was I wrong. 

Before I started actual fretting, I scraped the slots to remove any crap or glue slop from the bindings. To do this, I ground a hook in a dull shop knife blade, and ground the thickness down a little. This worked great.

DISASTER. The first fret I placed (fret # 1 on my guitar) did NOT bend to the radius of the fingerboard. Or rather, it almost did, but the extensions with the tang removed stayed straight, leaving a gap between them and the fingerboard. I tried to curved them a bit, to no avail. So I removed the fret, and this is what happened.

Having recovered from the klong, I made a little groove-filling shim of aluminum sheet and wax paper, and dribbled in some of than wonderful black epoxy I used for the inlays. Next morning, I sanded the whole fingerboard with the sanding bar, and the holes were practically invisible.

But back to fixing the disaster. I had 43 nicely cut straight frets which would not work unless I could come up with a way to radius them. Here it is - my "fret fixer." The fingerboard is a 12" radius. I guessed at half that (6" radius) for a press to curve tham, figuring a lot of springback. The lower part has a slightly oversize slot for the tang, the upper part has a round mortise for the head. Insert a straight fret and...

...clamp it in the vise. I got really lucky here. Look at all those frets I was able to salvage.

Here's one of the newly-fixed frets, straight from the fret fixer. I'm holding it up against my 12" radius sanding bar to show the slight extra curve, which is just what I wanted. 

From that point on, it was just a matter of pressing them in, with the nifty Stewmac arbor press mounted in my drill press. I added a little bit of titebond, applied to the fret with a toothpick, each time, following Bob Benedetto's advice (which I should have followed about radiusing the frets in the first place).

Here's the fret installed over that "disaster" chipped ebony. It's hard to spot the repair.

I trimmed and filed the ends of the frets, and thus concludes a thorny chapter of this build.

Shaping and Fitting the Necks

I was worried that the dovetail joints might be too tight, too loose, whatever. As it turned out, everything was pretty straightforward.

Sanding setup for the necks. I have a great vintage stationary belt/disc Sander, and it theoretically has dust ports, but they only capture about 30% of the dust. So I posted a fan in the window and moved the tool near it. Between the fan and the dust ports, it wasn't too bad,

With the tip and flat of the belt sander, using a new 40-grit belt, I shaped the neck to rough dimensions, leaving a little for hand rasping and sanding. The bottom one is roughed out, the top one is waiting to go.It was relatively easy to get decent proportions. I love the V figure that emerged as I rolled the headstock into the neck. 

I used a Nicholson rasp to bring the necks to their final fair shape. I stopped every few minute to remove the neck and feel it for symmetry. Part of the task here was knowing when to stop.

Laying out the fit of the neck to the body. This was a difficult measurement. A straight line along the centerline  of the fingerboard should fall exactly 3/4" over the top of the body at the location of the bridge. I placed the neck in the body and measured how far it needed to set down on top of the body to accomplish this. For one guitar it was about 1/4", and for the other it was about 3/8". Both seemed within specs. Next, I scribed both sides of the "waste" portion of the fingerboard extension, and marked it for cutting. I could only cut some of it away by sawing, leaving a lot of trim and "inside corner" work around the dovetail.

Trimming the waste for a rough fit. A sharp chisel, small japanese saw and shop knife let me trim away enough for a rough fit after bandsawing the waste, then back to the belt sander to shape the "floating" tip of the fingerboard.

The neck on the bottom is ready for a rough trial fit, the one at top is uncut.

After I got a decent rough fit, I made and added a heel cap to each neck made of curly red maple with a mahogany veneer separating it from the other maple at the "binding" line of the back.

Glory work! Fingerboards and Inlays at last.

I have been looking forward to seeing the necks take on their final "facial" appearance, and I'm pleased with the results.

First I needed to sand the excess neck maple away from the headstock bindings. To do this, I made a sanding jig the exact radius of the concave sides, and spray mounted successively finer sandpaper to it. If I hadn't done it this laborious way,  I'm sure the curve would never have been just right, and this would be really obvious to the hand and eye.

Sanding the other headstock side curves was easier, using a drill press sanding tool with a few grits of paper. That's a vac on the left, keeping the room just a little less messy.

Well, I had a heartbreak here, but it's going to be OK. My drill press quill has gotten a lot of side movement in it, from using the Wagner Safe-T-Planer. So when I drilled the tuner holes from the back of the headstocks, they drifted all over the place laterally. I just about shit myself. Anyhow, I repaired the drill press, plugged the holes (with maple dowels), and redrilled them. Fortunately, the tuners have washers on the top, which cover all the visible maple except for one hole on each headstock, which I patched with a cherry or cherry burl "Dutchman."

I bought preslotted ebony fingerboards from Stewmac. They're beautiful. They come with parallel sides, and needed to be tapered, so I made a simple tablesaw jig. Here's the first cut on each.

For the second, final cut, I reversed the fingerboard in the jig, and added the offcut from the previous cut, plus a spacer.  I had to do it this way because the boards had to be tapered from each side, relative to the fret slots.  Worked fine.

I used a special caul to glue each of the fingerboards. You can't see them in this photo, but there are three alignment pins through the caul and fingerboard into the necks, to make sure the fingerboards don't slide under clamp pressure. 

I used maple and cherry for binding the sides of the fingerboards. I clamped the bindings hard against the fingerboard, then used superglue to weld the wood together. The cauls here are covered in wax paper. I use "Cut Rite" brand wax paper because the name suggests it should be used in woodworking.

I mitered the binding joints at the base. Here is one being clamped for gluing.  I left the bindings just higher than the top surface of the radiused fingerboard, so I could use it as a stable base for my mini router when inlaying.

First inlays: diamonds on my neck. I used .3mm mechanical pencil to draw alignment guides, then traced around each diamond with the pencil as I held it in position. Than I used a dental burr chucked into a Dremel Moto Tool with a router base. The black epoxy I mix will squirt up from the hole to fill those little cuts in the diamonds.

Mortises for the gold MOP inlays on Brendan's fingerboard. Same technique as the little diamonds, but a lot more ebony dust.

Here's how I made the pattern for the inlay pictures on the headstocks: First, I scanned the headstocks and inlays actual size, combined them in Photoshop, and printed them on adhesive label paper.  Then I peeled the backing off the prints, stuck the in their spot on the headstocks, and cut away the "inlay parts" with an exacto knife.

When all the pieces were cut out, I emptied my shop's pencil sharpener onto a sheet of paper and blackened my finger with the graphite, rubbing it in to the stencil. The graphite sunk onto the knife marks, leaving a clear pattern for me to cut.

The completed headstock pattern, ready for routing and cutting.

Since I wanted the best fit for these inlays, I only used the router to waste away the insides where I could. This was helpful in establishing the proper depth for the mortises. I cut the rest by hand with tiny chisels I made by sharpening jewelers screwdrivers. This was tedious.

I mixed cherry dust with epoxy to glue the 34 inlay pieces. 

I used black epoxy on the fingerboard inlays. I then let the whole thing cure for a day before sanding.

Sanding the fingerboard inlays took some time, but went very well. I purchased a 12" radius aluminum sanding block from Stewmac - the only expensive tool I bought - but it was worth every cent. I spray-mounted 60 grit paper to the block and used it to grind the shell and epoxy down to the ebony, then used 80, then 100, then 120, then 150, then 180, then 220, then 400, the 600 grit paper on the block to get a decent scratch-free surface.. 

Cutting waste wood from the sides and end of the fingerboard on the bandsaw. I taped blocks under the neck to support it during the cut,  and left a little extra next to the bindings, which will come off when I shape the necks, starting Monday.

Here are the necks in their present shape, ready for shaping, fretting, and attaching to the bodies.

Finished headstock inlays. You can see the patches over the two ill-drilled holes, which won't be noticed after the tuners and their washers are installed.

Making the necks, Part 1: Roughing it all out.

The bodies are "done," pending final sanding and a little more scraping. So it's on to the necks. Can't say the finish line is in sight yet, but it's nice to cut some lumber again.

My son Brendan was home for a while over Spring break, before flying off to visit UC San Diego, where he'll be going to graduate school next Fall. He and I cut and assembled the basic neck laminations.

We decided to make a 3-piece hard maple laminated neck, with the three layers separated by a thin layers of Hondouras mahogany veneer. We made a basic template and cut out the six maple neck laminations, but when it came to cutting the veneer, the pieces split like crazy and were basically unmanageable.  So we made a sandwich out of scrap 1/4 ply, with four oversize pieces of veneer in the middle, and then nailed them all together with my lovely little 23 gauge pinner. Then we cut everything at once on the bandsaw, and were happy.

We squared up all the wet-glue laminations in this simple gluing jig,  then clamped the hell pit of them. The one in the foreground is dried, the one in the back almost. 

After we jointed the top surfaces  of the necks flat and square, and cutting the end piece at a 4 1/2degree angle, I couldn't put it off any longer: time to cut the neck mortise in the "finished" bodies. This router jig took a bunch of fiddling, but held the bodies tight and square while I cut the dovetail mortises as described with a nice new 14 degree bit. I had visions of some massive disatser here,  but all turned out well.

Bob Benedetto prescribes another elaborate router jig for making the dovetail tenons on the neck ends, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out why, so I went ahead and made the first (side) cuts on my router table, with the same bit I used for the body mortises. In this photo, also, the slot for the "slightly bowed" truss rod has been cut with a spiral bit on the router table. 

It wasn't until I had to make the back dovetail tenon cut along the heel of the neck that I realized why Benedetto uses a  special jig: There's no way to hold the neck flat along the now-small bottom surface and canted back at the 4 1/2 degree angle. Sooooo I sacrificed  a little meat on one of my small wood clams to make the surface bigger, and ran the whole thing through, clamp and all.  Luckily, I've got plenty of clamps, having bought out an assortment of about 50 different ones from a retiring woodworker.

My wonderful Wagner Safe-T-planer did a great job of leveling and tapering bost of the backs of the necks, and then a similar operation tapering and leveling the backs of the headstocks. 

I cut a small rabbet at the base of the top of the neck, thsn glued on the neck extensions as shown in the book. This is not a very strong joint, but it will be strengthened greatly when the fingerboard is glued in and when the neck and part of this extension is glued to the body.  One of these neck extensions did not align properly in gluing, and I had to face-glue some veneer to the front of it, then sand most of it off, to make it perfectly level with the rest of the neck top. No harm done. 

I added the headstock "ears" to make it a little wider, then cut the cavity for the truss rod end and adjuster. 

Here's the cavity at the other "head" end of the truss rod, where the the non-threaded part is. Not quite finished yet. When both end cavities were squared away, I cut and threaded the rods to size, wrapped the "slightly bowed" truss rods in a little felt, and glued a small strip of cherry over it to seal the slot.

I cut and collect burls from trees near my house.  A few years ago I cut this cherry burl, which I unwrapped (pieces had been coated with Penofin and tied back together to season) to look for a piece for one of the headstock top veneers.

These are the two headstock face veneers. On the left,  a piece of cherry veneer bandsawn from one of the burls in the photo above. On the right, a piece of cherry from some firewood with grain I admired and saved a few years ago. I wanted the two headstocks to look quite different.

Here's the current state of the necks: Headstock veneers in place, as are the thin curly cherry veneers on the back of the headstocks (beautiful stuff, left over from our kitchen cabinets). russ rods in place and snug. You can see the little veneer build-up I had to do on one of the neck extensions, but it's dead flat now.

My headstock blank on the left, Brendan's on the right. The top shape is similar to one of the Epiphone archtops. Brendan and I liked it because it's graceful and assymetrical.

Next job: fingerboards, bindings and inlays. The glam stuff.