Firebird fretboards

Got a late start today but started making fretboards for firebirds today. Dave came down and took a bunch of pictures. We got a couple done, have a couple more radius' and ready for the fret slots tomorrow.

Starting off slicing up some rosewood



A piece of Bolivian Rosewood and a couple Indian Rosewood sticks going through the sander


Attaching a board down to a spoiler board to run on the CNC


ahhh... the required BFH to remove loosen the collet



out of focus fret slotting bit. Tiny bastard. Im going to talk to our saw blade sharpening guy about grinding down one of our old CNC's saw blades (it has a 4" dia blade to cut back grooves) to do slotting. The router bits take FOREVER!


Speaking of forever... when I cut things on a radius like the fret slots (they get cut to match the surface radius) our CNC won't cut those to depth in incremental amounts. So I have to manually program the machine to cut a bit deeper each time over about 15 passes.

Well this requires standing there for 30 minutes hitting start every 3 minutes. PITA. Finally I got bored and found a stick, wedged the "start" button down and went in the office to play guitar with Dave :lol:


checking inlay pocket depth...


Ahhh poor Dave. I gave him the joyous job of scraping double side tape residue off.


Daves FB finished!


Dave's awesome use of the focus but his board with side dots installed.

I forgot to take pictures of the others tonight so this will have to do. I routed mine with blocks and started binding it today.

fun day :D