Guitar Project

Step 8: The fret board

I did go out and buy a nice piece of cocobolo for the fretboard.  It is a really nice variety of wood and looks really sharp.  The spacing for the frets were found with an online fret calculator.  You can just search google and find a decent one.  Then with a dial caliper and square the individual positions were scribed and cut with a thin saw.

While perusing the home depot I found some hardwood screw caps and used them to make the dots out of.  Just drilled a bunch of small holes, glued them in, and sanded them flush.  Finally the top of the fret board was rounded with a home made radius sander.

The sander is a pretty simple device.  I saw one at a store and decided it was to simple and useful to shell out $35 on, so I just made it on my table saw.  Its a pretty simple concept.  Take a short length of 2x4 and saw a wide channel.  The thickness at the bottom should be about a 1/4" glue some sand paper to the bottom and use some nuts and bolts to expand the top and change the curvature of the bottom.  It does a surprisingly good job.

Comments

[flie727]

Amazing work!

I just wanted to point out that cocobolo has some toxicity from the oil & dust.

This is usually seen from turning, but it might also be present when sanding & so you should consider using respiratory protection when working it.

Here's a link to a page that lists the toxicity of some of the exotic woods: http://hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/_@_toxicity.htm

I hope it plays as great as it looks!

[rwm9]

Hmm . . . thats very interesting, I never really thought of dust as toxic It makes sense tho. I am kind of sensitive to wood dust so I usually use one of those paper dust masks when doing something that generates dust, It really helps a lot. As far as this project goes I thought the walnut dust was much worse, the cocobolo seemed just to clump up because it was oily.