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When To Radius...


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Pretty self explanatory. The shell is glued the tape with a dot of CA glue. The radiused board wasn't a problem provided I kept the scalpel blade straight whilst tracing the outline.

Thats the way i do it to setch, although lately ive been ignoring the tape. Tried it without tape, and i dont like it as much. Ive cracked a few pieces of shell trying to remove them from the fretboards when i dont use tape.

Pre-radiused, pre-slotted. Only way to go. Easier to lay out the shell grain (somewhat) too.

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  • 3 weeks later...

So the easiest way to do it, is kinda like Setch?? Get the outline on pre slotted, radiused, dremel it out. Clean it up with a chisel or whatever. Glue your inlay. File most of it down. Then use your radius block to get it even. Is that about right??

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  • 4 months later...

I do A LOT of inlay and actually it can be done either way.

Most of the time doing the inlay on a flat board and then radiusing the board is the way go. Not alway possible, like if you are inlaying an already made neck by like Warmoth or somebody, but this approach work well. Leaving the inlay just slightly under the surface of the board by .01 can help as well, limited blow through.

However, sometimes having a preradiused board is actually referable. This situation occurs when you have a complex inlay made from a lot of pieces. The pieces of the inlay can be bend over the radius allowing more material to be in the wood. This lowers the chance of blow through. Plus, if you are using Paua or other Abalam type material is also lowers the change of shell feathering. Abalam is made a series of very thin shell sheets bound together with epoxy. If the inlay is done flat and then radius you can sometimes get a ridged effect on the shell like looking at the edge of plywood. It still looks ok, but it could look better. This effect does not occur with Mother of Pearl of other solid shells. The picture below was don't on a radiused board.

sginlay2.jpg

However, the board does need to be reradiused after the inlay is sanded flat. I found the easiest way to do this is with a long radiused sanding block.

Hope this helped.

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  • 1 month later...

Ideally, I inlay on slotted, radiussed boards that aren't quite finish-sanded anyway. Rough-radiussed, if you will. Bulk levelling is done with a file, then I go over the entire board with a wood radius block and some 220 grit paper, just a few strokes, which gets everything where it needs to be quite quickly.

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  • 1 year later...

If I'm fretting a fretboard with material that won't shatter upon cutting(shell, although I just assume it will chip....i maybe wrong) or dull the saw prematurely(metal), I'll inlay first and slot after, so the slots go perfectly though the inlays. If I can't do that, I'll slot first and stop the inlay 1 or 2 mm before the fret slot, then continue it again on the other side 1 or 2 mm away from the fret slot. Once the fret is pressed into the board, you won't see the space anymore.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 3 years later...

I've done hundreds of inlay jobs in the last ten years for guitar companies, banjo companies, hobbyists building kits, and on my own guitars. Nobody has ever sent me a non-radiused board. It's either a radiused, slotted board. Or it's a whole neck with board radiused and slotted. Or a whole guitar. Sometimes already fretted.

Routing is not a problem on the radius. And having the cavity follow the radius is sometimes an advantage. For times when I need the bottom of the cavity to be absolutely flat I use a fixture that holds the board with flat rails along the edges and an extra wide router base that won't slip of the rail on one side.

I make different style bottoms out of plexiglass for the Stew-Mac Dremel router base. My standard base is smaller than the one that comes standard on it.

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  • 6 months later...

I hope I'm posting this in the correct thread. Ok I've read this entire thread and I have some questions.

it seems the general consensus on inlaying is to use an un-radiused board to start so thats what I purchased. I want to do a one piece inlay at the 12th fret thats 1.75" wide.

The MOP blank I got from stew mac is .050 thick and I want to put a 14" radius on the board when its done.

What I'm worried about is sanding through the edges of the MOP when I radius the board. Is this simply solved by purchasing and inlaying thicker MOP stock?

Second question.

My fretboard is ebony and I planned on dying it black. Obviously if I dye it first the dye will get sanded off after I radius the board.

If I dye it after its inlayed and radiused am I going to discolor the MOP?

This is compounded by the fact that I want to put maple binding on the neck.

So that means at some point I'd have to sand the binding to match the radius and thus remove the dye again. I'm thinking that trying to dye the ebony portion only by taping off the maple could end in disaster. That black dye seems to migrate and get all over everything.

So what is the best technique and order to do this

Any advice would be appreciated.

Edited by sdshirtman
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  • 1 year later...

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