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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


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

Thanks for sharing Doug! Fasinating stuff!

Tony

Thanks Tony! I got your email btw just haven't had a chance to get back to you. I've got my suppliers out there looking for korina

First attempt at binding... so far so good. It should shape up nice when the board gets finished off with a radius sanding block.




I'll drill it for dots tomorrow. Cut a simple board with dot inlays today too.

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.


Some fretboards waiting for side dots

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..



Some other 'birds getting boards on

firebird jr

dad's firebird

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!

Some sweet rosewood there!

Tony

I'm going to have to make this a quicky update, there are more pics in my "blog" link.

First I had to build me a little roll around cart, I went a little over the top on this guy but it works out.




Starting to rough in the profile using a "microplane" thing on my palm sander

I'd scribble with a pencil on the neck from time to time to use as a guide coat to see my progress.

Dave (bluesmandave) and Steve's son Danny comparing my firebird against the current batch

Steve and Danny working the heel contour

shaping the heel...

shaping the heel some more....

and some more.....

The finished product!

It worked out pretty well. Steve and Danny worked in the heel to rough shape, I shaped the necks, Steve finished the heels and Danny and Dave did final sanding/shaping. We got 5 of the 8 done yesterday Dave is also apparently the shops official photographer and goop scraper.



OH on a side note... I have some special material coming in about 2 weeks. I'm going to be starting one *last* (for a while!) firebird for myself pretty soon

Are they neck-through or set neck? VERY nice either way!

Tony

Neck through ofcourse! I do em right Tony

Another Sunday, another day working in the shop. I know its blasphemous but its Superbowl and we all would rather be here working then watching the game. Today we finished the last 4 necks and started the inlay work.


Some Mother of Pearl taped down ready to get cut on the CNC. This stuff murders bits... my day ran short because it fragged my last 2mm OD cutting bit.

Block inlays on my "GLT-P90" being laid in.

The other Dave... working on his Firebird. Dave plays in Steve's band.

Steve and Danny hard at work sanding here. SO much sanding to do...

Getting ready to work the MOP trap inlays down

Inlays worked flush to the board. This board is REALLY pretty, pictures don't do it justice.

Danny's 'bird with block inlays.

Back at work shaping in necks.

Over at the other side of the shop Steve and Dave are drop filling a couple spots with epoxy. This fretboard has a worm hole that showed up after cutting the radius. Luckily its after the 22nd fret so we just filled it with epoxy.



Ready for frets


We did a little work on Dave's Harmony Rocket today as well. Running it through its paces after stringing it back up.


thats all folks (for today!)

Neck through ofcourse! I do em right Tony

I should have known , but I HAD to ask. Stunning work! I'm a little jealous!
It must be sweet to be able to at least say you had some done some work on it yourself.
You missed a great game, but I'm sure you had a warm fuzzy feeling after getting so much accomplished!

Tony
PS - DO let me know if you find out about that wood I asked about, OK?