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Fingerboard Ordering Confusion Help!


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I'm trying to figure out what I need... :D

On the one hand, I'd like to go with LMI, because I like the idea of the zero fret they offer and also of buying the coiled fretwire from them too, just to save the extra step of bending it myself. I plan on ordering two boards and having both slotted and radiused. But I also noticed that they offer a fingerboard thicknessing service --so do I need to have this done too (it doesn't make sense that they would radius a board that needs to be thicknessed, does it?).

Otherwise, since I need to order tools from Stewmac , I can just order the boards from them. But here's my question --Stewmac says their boards are cut for 24 frets. Does this mean I could use the top fret as a zero fret (trim off most of what's behind it) and just make a standard 22 -fret board? Or does that screw up the scale?

If I order from Stewmac, I'll just get their fretwire too and figure out a way of radiusing it later on...

One last question: I like the idea of an ebony fretboard, but will that be too difficult to work with for a first neck?

I need to order tonight to make sure the package will get there before I have to come back to France...

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Placing a Zero fret where the first fret is suposed to go and cuting of the rest will shorten your scale, as if you were playing with a permanent capo on the first fret. I wouldn't recommend doing this if your intentions wasn't to make a shorter scale neck. Go with the LMII board if you would like a zero fret neck.

I think that there is a fret bending machine building tutorial in the tutorial section.

An ebony board is harder to fret if you are hammering in the frets. That said, my first fret board (some 15 years ago) was an ebony board and it turned out pretty good.

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No, I want to keep the normal scale.

I just started to like the zero fret idea, after the latest thread on it...

Okay, so I just need to know if the LMI boards need to be thicknessed on top of everything else --they seem pretty thick, like 7 cm? But maybe that's a good thing? If I have to pay for thicknessing too, that starts to get pretty expensive...(oh yeah, I do plan on getting a radius block from StewMac, but I got a feeling sanding off 2 mm will take a looonnnnggg time)

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if you use the stew-mac boards or any other supplier you cannot use the #1 fret for a zero fret. It will ruin the scale. You would need a board specifically cut for a zero fret or possibly get one for a fender style nut that is NOT nut slotted yet and cut you own zero fret in the nut area, but I dont reccomend this if this your first.

The zero fret is like a nut and is where your scale starts, It is mostly used on high end guitars. It is simply a preference of some players. Remember that if you do use a zero fret you will need a TALLER fret for the zero fret.

Hope this makes sense :D

You can radius the frets by hand, its not that bad.

ebony will not be any more difficult than the rosewood, IMO

Tommy

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I guess you mean 7 mm :D

That is pretty thick. Get it thicknessed or the neck will look odd. On topp of that you might get trouble if you are using StewMac Hot Rod trussrod and an ultra thin neck. To litle wood left behing the trussrod...

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Yes, I plan on ordering a bit of taller fret wire just for the zero fret.

I played around with installing an enut type zero fret yesterday...I didn't do any kind of careful job, but the difference in tone between the brass fret I used and the nut on the guitar was pretty obvious...I really liked the way the strings rang out with the brass under there.

So I figure, as long as I'm going to build my own neck, I might was well go whole hog and gave a zero fret too.

edit: oops! yeah, 7 mm --I'm typing while holding my guitar...

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The zero fret doesn't have to be taller, think about it, the frets are all an equal height, if you fret one, the string doesn't touch the fret in front of it, why is that any different for the zero fret, it is just like fretting the 1st fret, it doesn't have to be any higher than the 2nd to not buzz, the action of the strings makes up for that, with the angle it creates over the frets.

On the 2 guitars I've seen with zero frets, I asked the owners if the fret wire was all the same height, one had refretted it himself, and the other had it done professionally and asked at the time. They both had all the frets installed and levelled together. And those 2 guitars had the best action at the nut I'd ever seen, and no buzz.

At the higher frets it can be worth while "ramping" the fret board slightly, as the frets are closer together, they are much more likely to intercept the string.

And my own suzuki has a zero fret, which is brass like the other frets, and from constant string pressure has worn lower than the first fret, and due to highish action, still doesn't buzz. So it all depends on your action

If you wanna do something, it always has a better result, if you know what you're doing.

I'd draw a picture, but I'm to lazy to do it when its explaining something I'm shocked isn't so obvious to people who make guitars.

Edit : It may be better to use a slightly higher fretwire for the zero fret, just for the reason that if it wears down, you'll have to pull the nut, to change the zero fret. Although saying that, most fretwire is pretty hard, it would take a few years I reckon. Dunno about you, but I'd pick better action over the life of one piece of fretwire.

Edited by Mr Alex
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if you use the stew-mac boards or any other supplier you cannot use the #1 fret for a zero fret. It will ruin the scale.

The scale length becomes the distance from the orignal board's first fret to the original bridge when using the first fret as a zero fret. We talked about this twice in the last week. If you search for it, you'll even find math to back it up.

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if you use the stew-mac boards or any other supplier you cannot use the #1 fret for a zero fret. It will ruin the scale.

WRONG! The scale length becomes the distance from the orignal board's first fret to the original bridge when using the first fret as a zero fret. We talked about this twice in the last week. If you search for it, you'll even find math to back it up.

I am refering to him being able to use the scale that he purchased the board at.

Tommy

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No one ever expressed even thinking that(refer to swedish luthier's post).

On a side note. I used ebony as my first fretboard and the fret job and inlaying turned out well. Slotting ebony by hand is an entirely different story. It's a major pain.

OHHH I see said the blind man!

Sorry

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I appologize if I came on strong. It's just quite a few people have denied the possibility of shortening a fingerboard as a means of obtaining a shorter scale length lately. Apparently I've made it my personal mission to erase that myth; I have no clue why.

Idch, looking through lmii's catologue, I do not see a thicknessing service. However, I do see that all of their guitar fingerboards are 5/16" thick. You could leave it at that thickness, or sand it down to 1/4," depending on you preferable neck thickness. I can't say this with total certainty, but I imagine you'll get a fretboard that's closer to 1/4" at the center if they radius it for you.

peace,

russ

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Yep, Russ, I reread your post and your calculations, and you're right, I could go for it --I'd just need to work out the proper placement for the bridge, which isn't a big deal. But what I'm looking for is the usual Gibson scale length, so that leaves that idea out.

On the other hand, I took the chance and sent off an email to LMI about it --and whaddaya know, I already have the response: their fretboards are indeed thicknessed by the radiusing process and taken down to the proper thickness (1/4" or about 5 mm).

Good to know. And I have to give credit to LMI for the speedy response!

So I'm going to place my fretboard and fretwire order with LMI and get the tools (and some other parts I need) from Stewmac.

Mr. Alex--I'm going by what I've read, which is that the zero fret should stand somewhere around 0.10" (?) taller than the other frets--essentially the height that the nut slots would otherwise be. I suppose it depends on how low you like the nut action to be-- I prefer mine to be on the higher side (not my nuts, the nut....oh, you filthy people :D ).

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Not exactly responsive to the questions, but I have ordered several ebony fretboards from LMI (slotted but not radiused so I had to radius them - I can attest to their thickness). Every one was beautiful, dense and black ebony with no streaks. Really nice.

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I ordered two of the Macassar ebony boards, slotted and radiused...we'll see what I end up with, I didn't specify whether I wanted it black or striped (I think I'd prefer it striped though)... I also ordered the jumbo fretwire, because I'm really loving my new guitar, which has nice fat, tall frets...

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The zero fret doesn't have to be taller, think about it, the frets are all an equal height, if you fret one, the string doesn't touch the fret in front of it, why is that any different for the zero fret, it is just like fretting the 1st fret, it doesn't have to be any higher than the 2nd to not buzz, the action of the strings makes up for that, with the angle it creates over the frets.

On the 2 guitars I've seen with zero frets, I asked the owners if the fret wire was all the same height, one had refretted it himself, and the other had it done professionally and asked at the time. They both had all the frets installed and levelled together. And those 2 guitars had the best action at the nut I'd ever seen, and no buzz.

At the higher frets it can be worth while "ramping" the fret board slightly, as the frets are closer together, they are much more likely to intercept the string.

And my own suzuki has a zero fret, which is brass like the other frets, and from constant string pressure has worn lower than the first fret, and due to highish action, still doesn't buzz. So it all depends on your action

If you wanna do something, it always has a better result, if you know what you're doing.

I'd draw a picture, but I'm to lazy to do it when its explaining something I'm shocked isn't so obvious to people who make guitars.

Edit : It may be better to use a slightly higher fretwire for the zero fret, just for the reason that if it wears down, you'll have to pull the nut, to change the zero fret. Although saying that, most fretwire is pretty hard, it would take a few years I reckon. Dunno about you, but I'd pick better action over the life of one piece of fretwire.

Hello,

I have never built a guitar with a zero fret before. I thought I understood them correctly, I thought the strings rested on the zero fret and the nut just held them in line.

If the strings did not rest on the zero fret would intonation be incorrect due to the space between the nut and zero fret?

if the zero fret was the same height as the rest, and the strings were not resting tight on the zero fret wouldnt it buzz when played open and or intonation be off?

And it seems to me that if the strings were not resting on it, it would be useless

This is just a theory that I have had in my mind a while but never put into practice. Someone straighten me out

I never heard of a motorcycle with a zero fret :D

Tommy

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I find it kind of odd that people who apparently can build a guitar from scratch, still pay for a ready made fret-board. I can't even call myself a 'guitar builder', because I've never built a guitar, yet I've made a couple of fret-boards from scratch. One was a maple board that I got out of left-over scrap from my maple work-bench.

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I don't find it odd at all. I've slotted my own fretboard. I did it on my first build. It's not something that you have to hone to be good at. Just cut in the right place at a 90 degree angle. It's much easier and more precise to have it done by a machine with a blade that I do not care to pay for. Honestly, I find it odd that people want to waste an hour of their life hand slotting a fretboard(which they could buy) when they could be making wooden pickup covers or something else that's harder to come by. Also, there is a day and night difference between slotting maple and ebony. My only motive for building instruments is to build something different and better than what I can buy in the store. If I can't do it better, than I buy it. Hence, I now buy my fretboards preslotted(not to mention the cost of having a board slotted is negligible). Although, I like radiussing the boards by hands, but that's just so I can control the radius and thickness.

peace,

russ

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I find it kind of odd that people who apparently can build a guitar from scratch, still pay for a ready made fret-board. I can't even call myself a 'guitar builder', because I've never built a guitar, yet I've made a couple of fret-boards from scratch. One was a maple board that I got out of left-over scrap from my maple work-bench.

Because some people would rather get $100+ an hour for refrets or fret levels, and pay $7 to have a board slotted, than to spend an hour cutting a fretboard themselves. Thats my reasoning.

PS. I dont chop down, machine up, or dry out my own timbers either, nor do i hand make my truss rods (well, mostly i dont), tuners, bridges, or pickups. Somethings are just done better, cheaper, by others.

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Matter of personal choice, I guess. I slot by hand (and even in ebony, the actual slotting takes only about 10-15 minutes, taking it nice and slow) because, frankly, I don't want to spend 30 bucks on a fingerboard I can buy a blank for for about 13 (top grade ebony), 9 for good grade ebony, 4 or 5 for a nice Indian or Madagascar rosewood. I radius/thickness myself with a router sled in and all-in-one-go operation, takes another 10 minutes. The setup (StewMac mitre box, third-party japanese handsaw) has paid for itself several times over by now; if I had space, and was doing this to make money, I'd probably set up a power slotting system (table saw) and speed things up just a little bit more, but as it stands, I'm fine with what I've got.

Do whatever floats yer boat.

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Besides, the threshold for attempting to build a neck was high enough already (for me): if I had to worry about getting the fret slots exactly right, there's no way I'd bother.

Especially because I want to use ebony fretboards --might as well go all the way, I figure--and from everything I've read, they're much harder to slot. And I'm guessing LMI uses CNC to slot their boards...so I don't have to worry about whether the CNC machine had a fight with his wife last night...

Anyway, what I like about building my own guitars is that there are no rules...a purist may insist on building everything, from chopping the tree to winding his own pickups. Another guy is happy just refinishing his Squire. It's all about YOUR guitar and your project and what is going to make YOU feel like its yours.

At first I had no interest in building my own neck. But I really like set necks, and it's really too hard to find those. And they'd cost way more than I'm spending having LMI slot and radius my boards. I'm paying around $30 a piece...the entire neck, with fret wire, truss rod and graphite rods will end up costing me around $50...that's cheap enough.

As for the zero fret issue...well, I'm still wondering about this. I bought LMI's tallest fret wire --so where do I find wire even taller than that? If anyone has a couple of spare bits of fret wire they think will do the job, feel free to offer them to me! :D

But I'm guessing with a slight amount of relief in the neck that this really isn't an issue. The 'load' of the strings will be on the zero fret (the nut just acts a guide--so the slots are cut deeper than the zero fret, right?)

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I didn't mean to start a DIY fret slotting debate. I guess it reminded me of the time I ordered 2 unslotted phenolic fret-board blanks (you want fun material to slot ?) from LMI, and put a zero fret on one of them. I guess I was an over ambitious 25 year old at the time.

I was surprised the other night to look around at the spare necks I have and saw that 4 are 'zero fret' necks. I had thought I had 2 like that before I really looked.

I guess your tall LMI fret-wire is .050" tall. Tallest I have is .057".

Heck, you could probably do a TK Instruments style deal where the "zero fret" is actually a piece of metal rod, that fits into a round bottomed, shallow channel, done with a ball end, small dremel bit at the right location.

I'm too much of a mad scientist for this forum, I think . LOL

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