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Buy a different board. The time and effort you'll put into this build will far outweigh the cost of a fretboard blank. Chris

Resurrecting an old thread. I too have found myself spending much more time on sanding than I'd like. I'm looking at something like 45 mins for 120, 30 for 220, and back to 45 for 320. Granted these were setnecks (some tight corners) and basses (larger) but I'd still like to go faster! Figured this might be a good place to do that? 1- @demonx did your hire ever get faster, and how? 2- If the 'how' involved teaching him, would you share your guidance? 3- You and @rhoads56 mentioned relying heavily on RO sanders. Are you using them for just the flats? Or also bevels? Gut cuts? Sides?! 3a- What size disc for the various surfaces you use them in? 6"? 5"? 3"? 3b- Do you employ varying firmnesses of pads on your RO sanders for different surfaces or grits? 4- For those of you not using RO sanders do you have any tips, tricks, techniques of note (what you think is common may be news to others!) for sanding tops, sides, body round overs, necks, tight corners? Here's my current take: Tops/back/arm bevel: RO 120 + 220 and then cork-back sanding pad 320 Sides: Cork-backed sanding pad 120-320, flat for convex surfaces, round for concave Rounded edges: Small sandpaper sheet folded over twice to give it some firmness. 120-320 Gut cut, headstock transition, sculpted heels: same cork-backed round sanding block. Tight areas: 3/8" dowel or a popcicle stick wrapped in sandpaper. Alright boys, let's talk efficiencies! Chris

Sorry, I guess cupping would an across the width, what I meant to say was 'bow' as it's along the length... does that distinction even matter in burls? Lol Chris

OK, well here's where the journey ends for at least the near future. This is how the spalted maple turned out in the end. Looks like the longer green pull did in fact benefit this pieces as the spalted areas resisted the short blue pull... but some of them were no match for the longer green! It's hard to tell just how cool this one is from a low-grit sanded pic... but it shines more in person and the ink lines which are hard to see within the green are a lot cooler. I will also say that I was a little surprised when I resawed them... the buckeye cupped a good amount along it's length??? Away from one another. Didn't really expect that... but it's thin enough material that it won't be of any consequence. Sorry, no pics, didn't sand the inner surfaces so they'd have sucked to see bookmatched right now. Chris

Here's the low-down Curtis (cactus juice brand owner) gave me after reading this thread. If I have stuff to add I'll make it clear that they're my additions: Soak only on first color will typically give you more of an organic dye look. If I was soaking those pieces, I would expect to need to soak 10-12 hours probably. What happens with soaking only is the wood picks up the first color through natural capillary action in the more porous portions of the wood. Then, when you cure, those become impervious. Then the second color with full vacuum draws the second color into the remainder of the wood. The first color, if soaking, should be your highlight or secondary color. The final full vacuum color will be your primary color. (Chris: this makes sense given that my second color pulls didn't really take that well) You are going REAL short on your second vacuum time if I read the write up correctly. I believe it said you were only pulling vac for 2 hours. Even with pen blanks, I am almost always needing to pull vac for 6-8 hours, sometimes even more... The more air you remove, the more resin you get back into the wood and the better the material will be stabilized. (Chris: After talking more with him about how I was getting color into the center he agrees that you can get full penetration with a shorter vacuum, but to get the fully saturated- and I'm guessing additional structural benefits- one should pull longer. Therefore, I'll be pulling much longer vacuums in the future especially for things like making fretboard material from stuff that would otherwise not work for that as well as for tops of questionable stability that I may want to use on chambered instruments) On the same topic as above, if you are not pulling full vacuum for your elevation, your bubbles will stop much sooner than they would with deeper vacuum. That is what makes me ask about the level of vacuum you are pulling. I assume you can see into your chamber. If not, you really need to be able to since the only way you will know when your blanks are properly vacuumed is when the bubbles stop coming out of the material. Again, though, if you are not pulling full vac for your elevation, even if the bubbles stop at 2 hours, you have not completed the job of stabilizing. The shelf life of activated Cactus Juice is 1 year, not sure if you knew that but saw where you mentioned it has a shelf life so I thought I would point that out. Dry the wood at 220° F for a MINIMUM of 24 hours. With bigger pieces, it will need longer than that. The only way to know for sure is by weight. Weigh the blanks first, then cook for 24 hours. then weight again and put them back in and cook for a couple more hours. Keep repeating this until you get two consecutive weight readings that are identical and your wood will be 0% moisture content. You can probably do this one time for each different size piece you are doing to get a baseline, then when doing a similar size piece in the future, just dry the the same time as the baseline. Any moisture that is in your wood will give you grief. First, it causes considerable bleed out when curing. Second, moisture occupies space in the wood that you could be filling with resin. As above, the whole objective of stabilizing is to saturate the wood. Cure your blanks at 190-200° F. Make sure and use an oven thermometer as oven dials are notoriously inaccurate. Hope this helps. Again, as I'm learning more about this though I'm learning more about the safety precautions I SHOULD have been taking. I'll be buying elbow-length gloves next time I experiment and won't be doing any more stabilizing until I get a "shop oven." Until then... off to go try and clean my current oven real good. Chris

So I have a TON of new info to add after these experiments and talking with Curtis (owner of the cactus juice brand) that I'll get up here later. However, I want to put out one big warning: Do NOT use your home oven. The fumes put off during curing aren't toxic... but they're by no means healthy and something one should strive to breath. I have some spillover that really smelled bad when the temp was cranked to cook actual food... needless to say that was put to a stop until I can do some heavy duty cleaning. Toaster ovens are fine for small pieces... but I guess I'll be scouring craigslist for a cheap beater oven to keep out in the barn and roll outside for curing. Chris

Another thing that I learned is to SQUEEGEE OFF AS MUCH JUICE FROM THE SURFACE BEFORE YOU PUT IT IN TO CURE! After my first curing rounds I had a lot of built up hardened juice on both surfaces that didn't leave me much flat surface to register off for the sander to clean off the faces before the next round. I ended up losing a decent amount of thickness due to this. When I squeegeed the stuff off after round too I ended up with significantly less sanding to deal with and a much better result. Chris

So I think there may be more to the "let soak for color round #1" business. As you can see here, the buckeye really didn't pick up that much of the purple color. Apparently to get what I wanted (purple highlights in a field of blue) I should have probably done a non-vacuum soak of purple, cured, and then done a full-vacuum pull on blue. Next time! Chris

Here's the spalted maple after it's blue round has been cured. As you can see a normal board that's all face-grain doesn't absorb nearly as vividly (especially in a shorter 45-minute vacuum cycle) as the wild end-grain rich burl. However, this should leave a lot of cool real-estate for the green to fill in tomorrow! Also notice how the sections that have spalt are less inclined to absorb the color. Chris

One other thing to note... with all the cleanup and gloves... this process is a PITA for large pieces! I'm starting to see why the folks that do this charge so dang much! It also uses a lot more juice than I would have expected!!! These two buckeye pieces and the spalted maple together drank up 3 pints of blue juice! For your info the tops are ~1/2" thick before resawing and the small buckeye burl slice was only 1/8". So that's a decent amount drunk up and/or lost during the process. Not cheap. Chris

OK, so back to experimenting... this time on some larger pieces, including some for tops! Everything you see below had a 45 minute vacuum in blue cactus juice, and then sitting in it without vacuum for the recommended 2x-vacuum time. Piece one is currently back in a second color bath of purple. Piece two will stay as-is. 1- This is a top that I will resaw to about 3/16". This piece was a purely white buckeye burl... so none of that typical swirl of blue/white that most buckeye has. This is important as you'll see the vast difference between a white buckeye piece and a normal one that have gone through the same process: 2- This is a smaller piece that I'll be using for just accents and stuff. But this piece was your stereotipical buckeye burl. Notice how different it is from the first piece: Tomorrow I'll hopefully show you the finished piece #1 with blue/purple done as well as a spalted curly maple top that has blue/green. Chris

As with all schematics I see from every company it'd really be helpful to know their intended "scale" point. And then a measure from that to any anchor points (like screw or post centers). I do also think knowing the diameter of the rounded saddle pieces would be great so that you could factor that into your intonation calculations in the event they're not inclined to publish my previous suggestion. As for the projection... they say they're Fender replacements... I should have just gone with that .425" Fender projection standard and just not questioned it. Sometimes I screw myself over thinking through things TOO much and trying to get too exacting... But after a couple hour's work, all is fixed! Just glad I put them together in the white before sending them off for finishing! Chris

So I'm going to amend what I have above. 0.4" is a tad too little! It's always fun how the real world doesn't always match up to calculations and models... And then add onto this somehow I set the necks deeper than desired and didn't notice... They're at 0.385" projected. The high G string, at it's lowest setting, is 1/64" too high, and the low E string is about 1/32" too high. This is on a 9.5" radius FYI. So one should aim for a little over 0.4" actually. I say this because 1/32" is .03125". So 0.385+.03125= 0.41625". So yeah... the canonical .425 probably was smart to aim for after all... Yay, now I get to figure out how to go about dealing with this... this should be a joy... Chris

I too would not use that piece. Just not the grain you're looking for in a structural piece like a fretboard. Chris

@Skyjerk @KnightroExpress: James MacDonald Art Guitars Chris

Yeah, that really is absolutely stellar. This is putting us to shame here. Chris

Here's Charlie talking about his tunings and how it works in an article. He is indeed using both bass and guitar strings. However, as was hypothesized above, in order to do this effectively you'd need a pretty wide multi-scale spread... just look at his lol http://www.premierguitar.com/articles/24673-charlie-hunters-impossible-mission Chris

I believe that was the plan. But the pics have his Instagram handle. Drop him a message and ask. Chris PS: The band he uses this in has a sparsely-used Instagram account too: deathbyotter The first post is a video that you can hear this thing on. Doesn't provide info on how he's getting that sound... but hearing it may clue you in. Comments say the mini-coil was made by Jason Lollar to replicate one used by Charlie Hunter's on his Traugott guitars.

Ah! A friend of mine actually does exactly this; in terms of what you're looking for. He has guitars set up with pickups that were made for the low strings and have a separate output. He processes those totally differently. His goal, also, was to do both bass and guitar as one man. Here's are pictures of his incarnations: Chris

Hmmm.... that's an tough one. That's a fairly large leap between the string sets, which is what's going to make it difficult. I do not think simply having a slightly modified gauge would help you here. I think you'd end up having to really fine tune the gauge of each string to match your desired pitch and tension. This might be a good starting read: http://www.hago.org.uk/faqs/formulae/ Some quick math, and knowing the scale and tension you like for your top 4 strings, would allow you to re-calculate the gauge needed to replicate that feel (tension) on the longer scale. I think a better question though is, "Why do you want this setup? What is the goal?" With an answer to that you may find that what you're looking to do is better handled by, say, a multi-scale instrument, or that long scale isn't what you're really looking for, or any number of other answer. I think you'll get better advice asking that question first. Chris

I'm using CNC. No need to do one before the other hahahah. I'm using light blue transparent acrylic so no need to pour anything. Chris

For the endmills are you generally using upcut or downcut? Is there a particular reason you've chosen a standard router bit over spiral endmills for body profiles? Chris

So as I co to use to learn more about CNC I keep finding brand new rabbit holes to go down... that often you HAVE to go down... to improve your work. The latest one is bits. For some reason shopbot and the community love Onsrud bits... but there are a million options from them and things quickly get daunting. Ive read through most of the threads in this forum and haven't seen this stuff yet, so let's get a comprehensive thrread going! 1- What bits do you use? (Brand, model, dimensions) 2- What operations do you use them for? 3- Why did you settle on that bit for those operations? Let the fun begin! Chris Calling out @MiKro @RestorationAD @demonx @Myka Guitars

OK, admittedly that may have created an itch to scratch... Chris

PS: @Prostheta you will probably get a kick out of these tables then if you like the live-edge idea you discussed above: http://gregklassen.com/collection/river/