The day a guitar starts to look like a guitar...

Well we had another productive sunday in the shop today. Had the full crew today, Steve, Dave and Steve's son Danny. I finished running the fretboards a couple days ago so today we drilled side dots and glued boards down.


This is one half of the fretboard clamp jig I came up with.

The top uses 3 of these radius' to match the board to end up like so...

This is the general idea. Seems to have worked very well.

While I was doing that Steve worked on getting truss rods fit. While the channel is cut on the CNC sometimes they take some tweaking plus.

first the sanding at the head stock to allow room for the TR nut

Steve resorting to the BFH... a general trend around here

Over at the Shopsmith (!) I turned Dave loose drilling side dots.

Last week I made a Lexan template for doing this to make life easy.

Dave hard at work.

Once the side dots are drilled, installed and scraped it was time to start gluing the boards down.

First I tape off the general outline of the board to keep the glue from getting everywhere. Also the end of the board is marked out exactly to keep the scale length correct. Then spread the glue out...

Getting the fretboard down and lined up.

There we go! Board clamped down. It works well I put the middle one one first then tighten that one up while making sure the ends aligned.

Danny checking out the progress. I forgot to mention Danny installed the side dots and setup neck jigs. Thats his guitar in the clamp.

Lunch break..


"Firebird JR"


dave's firebird

My VII P90 and VII with full sized buckers

This is an indian rosewood board. I ordered a couple indian blanks because I wasn't sure I'd have enough of my material to cover both of Nick Greer's firebirds. Well I saw this one board and kept it for myself...

So there we go. Nice busy sunday!

=