PRSpoggers

I am doing my first neck with white limba and honduran rosewood and they are hard to work with, that combined with dull chisels and hand planes dont make it a fun time. I was thinking ebony would be a good choice for a fretboard wood.

I'm working on my first ever guitar build and I am slotting the neck. It's a very hard task to complete with a miter box and a fret saw and scale template for the frets. I would consider for the future getting the stew mac fret slotting jig but thats over 2oo dollars. Not a wise investment for a tool I'd only be using once in a while. For my first guitar, I will have to learn from my mistakes of fret slotting but how? I've considered a few ways, building a jig w/the indexing pin stew mac provided with my fret ruler, manually measure everything out or cut it with the jig with a table saw. I am getting a membership at a woodworking shop that provides me 2 hour blocks of full access to the workshop and tools. Every luthier doesn't have a perfect first guitar, yet I can learn from my mistakes. Where can I be pointed for guidance?

So my dad told me why not look for a workshop that you can rent out time and space for and I found one in Baltimore Maryland which is a 30 minute drive from my house and they have classes and open shop rental and I am so happy that I found this!!

10 hours ago, curtisa said:

Are you after recommendations for tools for fret slotting or filling mis-cut slots?

Fret slotting

19 minutes ago, curtisa said:

The template you're using is primarily intended to be used with Stewmac's proprietary mitre box. The notches are really meant to be used in conjunction with the pin that's fitted into their mitre box. The notches then fit over this pin to position the board to a precise location to allow you to cut the fret slot. Advance the template to the next notch and cut the next slot. It's designed so that you don't have to worry about precisely positioning your blank in the mitre box as the mechanical locating mechanism takes all the guesswork out of the equation.

That's not to say you can't use it as a guide to manually align your saw with the template, but it does make it more difficult and more prone to errors creeping in. Your photos illustrate one potential issue in that unless you're viewing the board directly above the notch you're trying to line the saw up with, parallax error can make the notches appear further left or right than they actually are. The template being underneath the fretboard also makes it difficult to line your saw up with as you're not actually placing the saw blade directly on the notch; there is always some distance between the cut you're trying to make and the reference to which you're trying to meet. Probably what would have been better would have been to use the template to mark the location of each cut with a pencil (ie lay the template on top of the blank and insert the pencil into each notch and mark the board), extend those marks using a square across the full width of your blank and then make your cuts using the saw in the mitre box and line up the blade with your pencil marks.

Ah so there may have to be another birthday gift to add to the list for me! Gosh and I want another amp! Hopefully that miter box from stew mac will do me well. But for my first time is using a regular miter box fine?

3 minutes ago, ADFinlayson said:

If I had a £1 for every mistake I made twice, I'd have at least enough for parts for a new build 

I assume most people on the forum are from across the pond! I met someone else on here from the same county actually!! But that is really reassuring!

I did my first ever slotting of a fingerboard yesterday and today I have to refill 6 or 7 slots because they don't exactly line up with my fret template that I am using. What tools are there that can do it like really fast and accurately without breaking the bank?

3 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

As I've already said above plus some more:

• Mark and align the centerline of the fretboard with the template.
• Pull the template firmly against the pinned edge
• Clamp the fingerboard and the template so they don't move when you're sawing
• Keep the saw upright
• Don't force the saw through the wood. Fretboards are very hard so don't expect the saw sink like a hot knife into butter.
• Work on the corners. Start with the outer corners and continue with the corners inside the slot you're sawing. That way you don't have to push through the entire width, making the job a little easier.
• Take your time. Rest when your arm fatigues. Exhausted muscles can't do accurate jobs.
• Do it when you're in the right mood.

is it ok to make mistakes the first time? I had to fill about 6 indicating slots because they didn't line up. I'm going to have my dad recut those for me because I don't have the steadiest hands.

1 hour ago, Bizman62 said:

Double check each of them to be perpendicular to the center line. Also double check that your slots match with the notches. It seems there's quite a few slots that have saw marks more than a blade's width off the slot.

If all the above is OK, you can continue. If not, try filling the gaps and resaw. If you can't hide the filled slots under the frets and they look bad, get a new board and use this one as a practicing piece. Sometimes it's better to abandon a failed piece than trying to fix it. Such a piece won't be useless, though, as you can reattach it on the notched template some 1/4" off the current location and practice. After you've cut it 3 or 4 times you can even turn it around and do the same on the other side!

I mean for the most part, I only had to refill about 6 slots which is fine, it's gonna get covered by the fretwire anyway, but for the rest of them they are all pretty dead center. For the future, how do I make this easier?

56 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

Double check each of them to be perpendicular to the center line. Also double check that your slots match with the notches. It seems there's quite a few slots that have saw marks more than a blade's width off the slot.

If all the above is OK, you can continue. If not, try filling the gaps and resaw. If you can't hide the filled slots under the frets and they look bad, get a new board and use this one as a practicing piece. Sometimes it's better to abandon a failed piece than trying to fix it. Such a piece won't be useless, though, as you can reattach it on the notched template some 1/4" off the current location and practice. After you've cut it 3 or 4 times you can even turn it around and do the same on the other side!

I refilled them and they look great! A little darker since my rosewood dust is dark, but I just need to recut them and we're in business. I'll have my dad do that since I don't want to waste a perfectly good fretboard that has just indicating slots, not actual cut to depth slots currently.

15 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

That too.

I guess a quarter of a millimetre is accurate enough.

These are my current slots, I tried lining them up the best I could

Just now, Bizman62 said:

You should aim to perfection in things like that. Learning away from sloppiness is much harder than learning to do it right from the very beginning.

So most of my notches on the fretboard are center, I will post pics of what I am talking about

Just now, Bizman62 said:

That too.

I guess a quarter of a millimetre is accurate enough.

Ok so I will measure and refill and adjust accordingly! 

2 minutes ago, ADFinlayson said:

If some  frets aren't in the right place then some frets will sound out of tune, if the slots are on the notches and they're perpendicular to your centre line, they will be spot on.

Ok so thats good to know! I may have to refill like two notches because they aren't center. But all the rest of them line up and are in the ball park in the area of the notch (this is a half circle notch from stew mac for a fret scale length calculator.) so that's fun! I'm not supposed to get everything right the first time right?

1 minute ago, Bizman62 said:

If the frets are in the ballpark it should play just fine. After all the location of frets is a compromise. There's 'tempered' frets that are curved even a couple of millimetres off the 'normal' for accuracy.

Ok thats great! I mean your first guitar isn't supposed to be perfect? Heck I'm going off what Paul Reed Smith did for his first (simple mahogany body and neck SC guitar)

3 hours ago, ADFinlayson said:

I always tend to start at fret 1 and work my way up because as @curtisa says, inaccuracy becomes more noticeable as you go up the fretboard - as the gap between the frets becomes smaller so does the margin for error, and I find once I've done a couple, I get more into the swing of it. I don't really like miter boxes for exact work because it's more difficult to see the work. As in my video I shared with you before, I find I'm much more accurate if I make a little nick with the saw on each end of the line, then join them up freehand.

You can definitely fill in bad slots with superglue and rosewood dust - I did that on my first fretboard. With ebony that will be totally invisible, it will be noticeable on rosewood, but if your slot is only .5mm off then your mistake would probably be hidden under jumbo fretwire anyway. Smoke and mirrors baby.

I'm using medium fretwire. I'm not necessarily measuring but I am lining up the notches up with the slot for my saw and just cut. I mean if they line up they line up. This is my first guitar, and mistakes are meant to happen. Question is, if wrongly cut my slots and I went on not knowing I did, will the guitar play poorly? I have my cuts in line with the notches on the fret scale template and my dad said they look fine. But from what I'm doing now and just decided to go on, will anything go wrong with the guitar?

11 hours ago, curtisa said:

Depends which fret slots are off and by how much. In the lower registers an error in fret slot placement will result in less pitch error than it would in the upper registers given the same error in absolute distance, due to the exponential reduction of the spacing between the frets as you work your way up the fretboard. For example, an error of 1mm on the first fret will be less audible than an error of 1mm at the 17th.

 

How wide is the notch you're using as your reference? If it's just a black etched mark as you'd find on a normal steel ruler I'd say that a fret slot falling on or within the edges of the mark would give perfectly acceptable results over the full length of the fret board.

It doesnt say but I have them lined up for the most part. I ran them through a miter box with a scale attached on the bottom so the wood is on top for cutting and I matched the notches up with the space for where my fretting saw goes and just cut. They line up fairly fine, not dead in the center but they line up within the notch.

I cut them through a miter box and used a template that I taped the wood too and the slots line up with the notches on the scale length ruler but some of them I have to redo because they aren't exactly on there, or I just cut the new slot which will I hope cover the slot I originally cut which is like really tiny space wise. I'm just worried that I didn't do it right because this is my first time doing a fretboard slotting I could've messed up. I can fix it with thin super glue and rosewood dust but still, do my cuts have the within where the notch is or do they have to be dead on straight down the middle of the notch? (I am using the stewmac 25.5 inch scale length ruler for frets)

I read on the internet that you are supposed to slot your fretboard first and then radius it and I am doing a fairly flatter radius (16 or 17 inches) and was wondering, do I slot first, then glue my fretboard on then radius?

1 hour ago, curtisa said:

Slightly deeper than the depth of the tangs on your fret wire. Anything less and the frets won't go in properly. Anything more...well, there's nothing wrong with it per se, but all you're doing is creating more work for yourself. Obviously if you make the fret slots too deep you'll cut straight through the fretboard.

In reality you'll probably lose a bit of depth on the cut fret slots after you've radiused the board and sanded it to a final finish, but all you do is then just quickly swipe the fret saw over each of the fret slots again with the depth stop set to the same position, just to make sure that all your slots still have a minimum depth to accept your fret wire.

What would be a measurement for that? I got medium stew mac fret wire as well if that will help with measurements for you

I am attempting my first ever neck from the ground up and need to cut fret slots. I have the stew mac japanese fret saw and depth stop. However, how much do I set my fret stopper to the depths that a fret will seat? I am doing a 17 inch radius so fairly flat. I heard half the thickness of the board for fret cutting but I don't know. I consulted trade secrets and that kind of helped me.

2 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

There's two reasons to use oil paint on a guitar. Either you want it to look like your granny's house in which case you'll avoid sanding as well. Or you're a budding Rembrandt in which case you'd need some more colours than just brown and black.

I remember the experimentations of @ADFinlayson, they were hair raising scary!

 

So I am going to thin it down with isopropyl alcohol, will it then be able to penetrate the wood? And will the wood grain (my guitar has a flame veneer on it) still show after thinning said paint?

2 hours ago, ScottR said:

Pigments are ground much coarser for paints as compared to dyes too. Paints are made to lay on top and completely hide what's underneath, and dyes, with ultra-fine pigments are meant to soak into the wood fibers and enhance them.

SR

so can I still use it if I thin it down?

I got black and brown oil paint for wood to finish my kit guitar but they're both thick and goopy looking oil paints. I read that you can use rubbing alcohol to thin oil paint, so will that thin it and will it be able to stain without like ruining it and not showing the figuring?

2 minutes ago, Bizman62 said:

Nice looking kit, but wouldn't it be much easier if you just attached the pictures right here, like this:

Sorry I didn't know you could do that!