FRETTING

This was in many ways new territory for me. Not that other processes hadn't been too but once you have gotten the hang of using a plane and a chisel, it doesn't really matter whether you are caring a brace or the heel. With fretting I felt like I had to learn to use new tools and materials.

I used LMI's FW74 medium fretwire.

PREPPING THE FRETSLOTS
Because of the compound slope and relief that was worked into the fingerboard after the fretslots had been cut, they needed to be deepened a little in order for the fret to be seated properly.

I set my fretsaw to cut cut a 2mm deep cut and started recutting the slots from the nut and onwards. It was tedious work as the saw kept jamming. In hindsight I should probably have taken the time to resharpen it and adjust the set, but as I was pressed for time I just muscled my way through it instead.

It worked fairly well on the slots below the 12th fret but once I went above trouble started. To protect the soundboard I used the plexiglass apron I used for final planing and sanding of the fingerboard, and though it did protect the top, it also made it very difficult to keep the saw in the slots. A few times the blade of the saw hit the plexiglass and made it jump out of the slot and making a shallow cut next the fretslot. I could have kicked myself three times (it happened three times).

I managed to do a fairly invisible repair by filling the rouge cuts with 5 minute epoxy mixed with sawdust from the fingerboard and scraping it flush.

Last thing to do was to bevel the edges of the slots with a triangular file to prevent tearing of the fingerboard surface if and when the frets need to be pulled out and replaced down the road.

INSTALLING THE FRETS
The frets were cut with a regular set of diagonal wire cutters. I cut them roughly 1/4" too long and placed them sequentially in a little holder I made from some scrap cherry. The first 10 frets were then hammered in with an 8oz plastic hammer, Starting at the middle of each fret working my way out to the ends. These were done with the neck supported by a block of wood. Frets number 11 to 15 were also hammered in but with the support of the bare heel resting on the workbench. Frets number 16, 17, 18 an 19 were pressed in using a regular bar-clamp and a piece of fingerboard scrap as a caul.

As I examined the results I couldn't help but notice that the frets had not gone in as cleanly as I had wish for. Most of them had areas where they weren't seated properly. Not disasterly so, but enough to be detected by the naked eye. I gave it another go with the hammering, but it didn't really accomplish much, even when pounding harder than I would think necessarry. I don't really know why that happened. I had checked the slot depth quite meticulously prior to installation and had the fret slots had insufficient depth it would have mostly likely been at the center. My unseated fret segments seemingly occurred in random places. I speculate that the saw kerf might have been too narrow for the job.

Also a product of a rushed job, no glue was applied to the fret tangs before the frets were hammered it. I only came to think of this after the task was completed.

LEVELING THE FRETS
First the fret ends were cut off flush to the fingerbard with a set StewMac's ground down end nippers. It was a really nice tool. Easy to handle and gave a nice and clean cut.

For the fret ends I had made a little jig to hold a 2"x6" diamond stone. The jig is quite simple, basically a block of plywood with a slot in it. One of the faces is square to the slot, allowing the fret ends to be dressed flush with the fingerboard edge, the face on the other side was cut to give the fret ends a 35 degree bevel.

First the little bit of fret tang that was leftover was ground down a 325 grit coarse stone inserted into the square side of the jig. Then the fret ends were beveled, first by cutting the 35 degree bevel with a 325 grit coarse stone and finished up with a 1200 grit extra fine stone. The fret ends were ground down just enough for the bevel to extend onto the fingerboard. The extra fine stone left the the fret ends with a nice semi-dull surface. I looked really slick.

The leveling was done with the diamond stones too, again first with the 325 grit, then the 1200 grit. They worked wonderfully. I tired to do keep the leveling to a minimum, but the less than perfect setting of the frets necessitated that I had to take off a little more until all the frets showed at least a little bit of flat surface on the crowns.

DRESSING THE FRETS
With a little protective steel fingerboard guards from StewMac place around the fret, I began to restore the crowns of the frets with a medium fretfile until only a thin uniform peak of flat surface was left. Before going any further I tested the levelling with Stewmac's little fretrocker, a tool that proved to be a handy little device. To my relief I only detected a few spots where a fret was protruding and needed to be taken down a hair by a light stroke or two with a fine file, but all in all it was pretty bang on.

Before the final polishing, first a piece of 320 grit, then 600 grit wet/dry sandpaper was used to run over the last bit of flat to smooth the crowns over. The final polishing was done with a little white ceramic polishing wheel fitted on a Dremel. I also have the green wheels, but tests done prior to the actual fret job proved they were considerably more abrasive, and spelled danger for creating dents and other irregularities to the frets. The white wheel, just left a nice smooth surface.

The sharp edges of the fret ends received a similar treatment.

FINISHING THE SPLIT 19TH FRET

I looked and looked to find information about how to deal with dressing the inside fret ends following the soundhole curve. Courtnall's book has no text, but a little photograph of them being filed 'free hand'. Bogdanovich' book has no information at all, neither does Cumpiano, or so I thought. Only after I had installed the frets, I noticed a sentence advising to shape the 19th fret ends before installation, under the section on installing the frets. Hmm...

Now that they were in, they had to be dealt with in another way. As The fingerboard didn't sit flush with the soundhole, a file couldn't be used. Instead I resorted to carefully grind them flush using the Dremel tool with a small sanding drum, trying only to grind away at the frets and not hit the fingerboard end and it kind of worked. The fret ends themselves ended up pretty nice, but the tangs less so. In hindsight it would have been better to follow Cumpiano's advice and at least trimmed the tangs before setting these frets. Next time!

The frets ended up with a crown between 1.02 and 1.08mm, with the lowest ones on the treble side.

BEVELING FRETSLOTS

CUTTING INDIVIDUAL FRETS TO SIZE

HAMMERING IN FRETS ABOVE THE 15TH FRET

CLAMPING IN FRETS BELOW THE 15TH FRET

NIPPING FRET ENDS

BEVELLING FRET ENDS

LEVELING FRETS

CROWNING FRETS

FINISH SANDING FRETS

CHECKING FRET HEIGHT

DRESSING FRET BEVEL EDGES

POLISHING FRETS

FINISHED FRET WORK

FINISHED FRET WORK

ADDING THE FINGERBOARD

I'm slowly finding out that Bolivian rosewood is really hard to work. Not only is it dense, but it tears easily and it blunts the edge of the tools fast. But it rings with a ping and it looks nice and has a very fine texture.

PREPARING THE FINGERBOARD BLANK
The fingerboard blank was quite oversized and had to be trimmed a bit before any actual work was done. First it was cut to width +1/16" on the bandsaw, which left a nice long stick 3/8" square that can potentially be used as fingerboard binding on a future build. Next the length was trimmed, also on the bandsaw.

I clamped the fingerboard blank onto the shootingboard and straightened and trued one of the sides to the flattest surface with a jack plane. The plane was fitted with a 50º bevel blade which virtually eliminated all tearout when it was set to a very fine setting. I deliberately left the other edge with sawmarks so the two edge were easily distinguishable as I wanted to use only one edge to cut the fret slots from. Last the ends of the fingerboard was trued to the finished edge with a low angle block plane.

I had to do the surfacing with a scraper plane. Even with a high blade angle the interlocking grain of the dense wood was impossible for me to control. The fingerboard blank started off at 8mm thickness that I had to get down to about 6.0mm to keep it a little oversized for later alterations. I took quite some time to get it down but down it went. I had to sharpen the blade a good few times. The Bolivian Rosewood seemed to eat the edge in record time making the blade very noisy and shrieking with every stroke. But, when it was freshly sharpened it took off shiny curls with a confident swooiiiiish, didn't tear and left a nice and smooth surface behind.

Once the surfacing was done, I went over the edge and ends one last time to get everything true and square.

DRILLING HOLES FOR LOCATION PINS
In order to prevent the fingerboard from sliding around in the wet glue I decided to use four location pins to keep it in place during gluing. A center line was first marked with white pencil on fingerboard face and and for marks were made with a scalpel at the center of the location for fret no. 1, 4, 7 and 11. With a 3/64" drill bit that matched the diameter of the four brads that was going to hold the fingerboard in place the four holes were drilled on my drill press.

I decided to do the holes prior to cutting the fret slot. I thought it would be easier to do it this way as the 3/64" drill bit was slightly wider than the slot. Had the drill bit been narrower, it might have been better to drill the holes after the slots were cut.

CUTTING FRET SLOTS
The fret slots were cut manually, that is, with the use handtools only as I don't have any fancy jigs for this. I used a fretsaw, a square and a caliper for this as well as a wooden stop block. To find the first five fret slot locations I used the wood block as a stop at the nut end. I set the calipers to measure a distance equal to the correct fret location minus half the width of the fretsaw kerf. The protruding depth measuring blade was butted up against the wooden stop block and the square was butted up against the caliper's beam.

The first five fret slots was cut with the aid of the calipers alone. For the rest of the slots I had to make some sort extension for the depth measuring blade. For this I fabricated a 150mm long spacer bar that was ripped into two equally long pieces. With the help of one bar inserted between the wood stop block at the end of the fingerboard and the depth measuring blade, the next eight slots were cut. The fret slots from 13 and onwards were done with two spacer bars in extension of each other.

I had one mishap. I accidentally cut the second slot in the wrong position. It turned out that the beam on the calipers had a little rebate at the bottom, and I accidentally butted the square up against that rather than the bottom of the beam itself. I quickly thicknessed a piece veneer to fill the slot, glued it in and leveled it flush to the surface and edges and cut a new slot in the correct location.

Prior to the cutting, I created a spreadsheet with the help of Liutaio Mottola's formula on fret spacing: D=S-(S/(2^(N/12))), D = distance from nut, S = scale length and N = fret number. The spreadsheet also included a column with fret spacing minus half the saw kerf width as well as a column taking saw kerf and spacer bars into account. This way I was able to read the measuring targets directly on the caliper display without having to make any further calculations.

SLOPING THE GLUING SURFACE FOR THE NECK ANGLE
Because the neck meets the body at a slight angle, a slight taper had to be worked into the gluing surface of the fingerboard from the 12th fret and onwards. I propped up a straightedge on the neck with two shims of carefully thicknessed veneer to keep it level, one at the nut and one at the 12th fret, allowing the straightedge to just touch the edge of the soundhole. I measured the taper to be about 0.4mm or about 1/64", equal to the thickness of the veneer shims.

The taper was done by scraping, mostly with a card scraper but I also used my large scraper plane to make sure the surface stayed flat. I proceeded quite slowly with this and did a lot of dry fitting to check the progress. It was quite a small amout that needed to be removed and I knew I could easily get carried away and take too much off.

TAPERING THE WIDTH OFF THE FINGERBOARD
I'm growing more and more fond of using knives for marking rather than pencils. I find it creates a more defined line and allows me to do more accurate work. This was the case too when I set out to measure and mark the taper of the finger board.

I first marked the center on each end and used that as reference to mark the width of the fingerboard, 46mm at the nut and 56mm at the twelth fret and scribes the two lines defining the outline of the fingerboard.

With the use of the shootingboardand and my trusted low angle jack plane, I worked the waste away, first with the plane set at a rather coarse setting, then gradually setting it finer as the work progressed. The last bit was done with the a very fine setting, similar to jointing the centerseam of the soundboard and back, by working from the middle down first and slowly lengthening the strokes until a full stroke would take of a fine shaving along the entire length.

CUTTING THE SOUNDHOLE CURVE
The fingerboard was then carefully clamped in position on the neck and the location pin holes were extended about 1/4" into the neck and the four matching brads were pushed in and driven a little further with a small hammer.

With my hand partially stuck throught the soundhol, the soundhole diameter was traced on the underside of the fingerboard with a white pencil. This was the first time I realized that the smaller soundhole of a 3/4 sized guitar could spell trouble for a pair of fully sized manhands. Luckily my hands are not that big and I was barely able to fit them through.

Next up was cutting the waste away with a coping saw. As advised by Cumpiano I made a little piece of backing, a 1/4" thick oiece of maple in my case, to prevent tearout. This worked very well. The final shaping was done with rasp first and then with a a file. This was also done witht the maple backing on.

As I wasn't completely satisfied with the fit, I decided to try out another cumpiano method, a sanding disc in a drill press to do the final fitting. I got a sanding disc made, covered it with some 120 Grit 3M stick-it paper and it all seemed fine.

However, this turned out to be less successful. What I didn't count on was that a sanding disc will cut more aggressively where it enters the work. Unfortunately this only became apparrent after my first attempt to true the curve as a quick dry fit showed the curve had moved to one side of the fingerboard. Even worse, that side had been sanded to short.

In the heat of the moment I saw only one solution to the problem; To sand the curve back in the middle again even though that would make the fingerboard about 1/16" short altogether. Well, that or start all over again with the fingerboard, but as the damage would only be cosmetic I chose to live with it. I am considering gluing a little piece of veneer on the end to get the fingerboard be flush with the soundhole, but the jury is still out on that one.

GLUING THE FINGERBOARD TO THE NECK
As the fingerboard already had been positioned and the location pins ready to hold it in place, the time had come to glue the fingerboard on. I had made a massive 1½" clamping caul out of plywood to go on top of the fingerboard as well as a caul for the inside of the soundbox from the 14th fret to the soundhole, that fitted around the upper transverse brace. A piece fo MDF was used as a caul on the underside of the neck and on the heel cap.

First the caul for the soundbox was put in place with with some blue tape. Again, I found it lucky that I was able to get a hand throught he soundhole to do this. It was a tight squeeze. A fairly liberal coat of glue, regular titebond, was applied to the underside of the fingerboard, and the fingerboard was carefully put in place, and the location brads tapped in a little further with the hammer.

Next the big caul for the top of the fingerboard was put on top and the first clamp was put on at the end, very lightly tightened to just keep the clamp in place. Next two bar clamps were attached into the soundhole. These were also only tightened very lightly. Next to go on was the middle one, around the 7th fret, then the last two, one around the 4th fret and one on the 12th.

Once the clamps were all on. I checked the alignment of the fingerboard and made sure it hadn't been sliding out of place in the wet glue. Little by little the clamps were tightened in the same sequence, while checking the alignment after each sequence, until all the clamps were on nice and tight and the assembly was left to dry over night.

CREATING A COMPOUND SLOPE AND RELIEF
I must admit that, at this point I stopped to make my bridge. Instead of manufacuting a dummy bridge for fine tuning the fingerboard thickness to desired string height. I though I just as well make to real deal and use that instead. But I'll describe that process in the next post.

For now I placed the completed bridge in the correct location fitted with a saddle protruding about 3mm. At the nut end I placed a 1.1mm thick shim to simulate the strings exit at the nut. I placed a straight edge on top of the shim and bridge and measured the string height, including a fret, at the 12th fret. It came out right on the money, or at least close enough to the 3.4mm I aimed for using a ruler and the naked eye.

With the straightedge I checked the flatness of the fingerboard again. I had aquired a few irregularities during the glue-up that had to be flattened. This was quickly done with my scraper plane on a very fine setting. I had made a little protective apron for the soundboard out of plexiglass that fitted around the fingerboard.

Some builders keep the fingerboard flat throughout and adjust the string height by making a saddle that is higher on the bass side but I'm not keen on that practice. For one I don't like the look of it and I also suspect that having a higher string break angle will drive the bass more which is no a desirable feature on classical guitars, where the trebles often are the weaker component. Instead I started to shave off material on the bass side to lower it and thus create more string clearance, while leaving the trebleside alone, while monitoring the progress carefully on the treble side, the middle and the bass side, to ensure the fingerboard remaind flat along the string axxis. The planing was done with the scraper plane.

Last I had to create a slight relief around the 5th-7th fret as this is where the amplitude of the string is greatest immideately after it is plucked, when played normally; Normally meaning with your right hand around the back edge of the soundhole.

Unfortunately I couldn't do this with my preffered choice of tools, edgetools, and I had to resort to sandpaper. I used 120 grit 3M stick-it paper on a 3"x6" MDF block for this, and though it was a very dusty affair it worked well. I started sanding in small strokes around 5th and 7th fret and slowly took longer and longer strokes, measured the progress and repeated the process until a 0.5mm relief was in place and finished the job off with 220 grit paper.

CUTTING THE FINGERBOARD BLANK TO SIZE

TRUING THE SIDE OF THE FINGERBOARD BLANK

TRUING THE END OF THE FINGERBOARD BLANK

SURFACING AND PLANING THE FINGERBOARD TO THICKNESS

MARKING FINGERBOARD FOR LOCATION PINS

DRILLING HOLES FOR LOCATION PINS

MEASURING FRET SLOT POSITIONS

CUTTING FRET SLOTS

MEASURING GLUING SURFACE SLOPE FOR NECK ANGLE

SLOPING THE GLUING SURFACE FOR THE NECK ANGLE

CHECKING THE NECK ANGLE SLOPE

DRY FITTING THE FINGERBOARD

MARKING FINGERBOARD OUTLINE

TAPERING THE FINGERBOARD TO FINAL SHAPE

MARKING THE SOUNDHOLE CURVE

CUTTING THE SOUNDHOLE CURVE

TRUING THE SOUNDHOLE CURVE

DRIVING IN FINGERBOARD LOCATION PINS

FINGERBOARD CLAMPING CAULS

GLUING THE FINGERBOARD

PLANING A COMPOUND SLOPE FOR THE BASS SIDE

SANDING RELIEF

CHECKING THE STRING HEIGHT

NUTS AND SADDLES - DEGREASING BONE

RAW MATERIALS

As I wanted to try and do this build from scratch as much a s possible, I bought some bone for nuts and saddles on eBay a while back. The vendors description at the time was: "2 lbs of treated cattle bone for carving", with a photo of a number of bone pieces cut in half next to a ruler showing them at about 4" long, a little on the small side, but I hoped that with a bit of effort I should be able to get a fair amount of pieces cut from them. I got the lot for about $12 plus $8 for shipping. They arrived as described and everything was honky dory.

I had been following discussions and articles on the net about suitable material for nuts and saddles, and there seems to be many possibilities and options. From man made materials like Corian and Micarta, to wood, shell, bone, horn, tusk and even stone and metals. But most sources tooted bone as very suitable for the job, because of it's density, workability, look and price.

Over the summer I attended a serious of lectures at my work by a paleontologist called Stuart Sumida. It was an obvious opportunity to pick his brain. I showed him the bones I bought and told him what they were for. He guessed they might be phalanges - finger or toe bones.

I also asked him what bone was the densest you could find, to which he answered a Baculum or penis bone. Apparently, if an male breaks this bone, there is no way any female with just a little self respect would ever even consider a 'little bit of how's your farther' if that bone wasn't intact on the male, and if you believe in evolutionary theory that should have resulted in the development of a very dense and strong bone.

Just for fun I did a little research, only to find out that they are rather small (not that I have anything to brag about), unless they come from a very large animal, and then even so, making them not very useful for nuts and saddle material. They are also protected under the same regulations as ivory, and therefore rare, expensive and best to leave them be.

CUTTING:
Normally, you have to cook your bone to get rid of all the soft tissue, but as mine arrive semi-cleaned I was able to get cutting right away. I selected the bones in order of thickness, selecting the one with the thickest walls for nuts and the others for saddles, and cut them on my bandsaw using a 1/4" 6TPI PC blade from Timberwolf. I tried to get as many pieces out of each bone as possible and at the same time have them as oversized as possible, leaving a variety of rough cut shapes and sizes to work with. Most of the nuts, however, came out about 1/4" x 3/8" and the saddles about 1/8" x 7/16". The longest piece of the usable leftover were cut into 1/8" squares for tieblock inlays. The rest was either kept for potential inlay material or simply discarded.

It was a little tricky to cut the bone pieces at times. I didn't dare use my hands for these small sizes and irregular shapes and using pushsticks made it a fiddly affair. Most came out in nice straight cuts but some were a little wavy too. Hopefully not more than can be cleaned up once the pieces are worked into their final shape.

One thing I did noticed though was the rather unpleasant, somewhat pungent and heavy smell of what I would imaging a crematorium smells like. I tried not to think about it to much, and stayed focused on not having any of my own bones slipping into the traveling saw blade.

DEGREASING:
One thing that became clear from all my reading was that it was imperative to degrease the living daylights out the bone before putting them on the instrument. If you don't, or do it insufficiently, the grease will continue to seep out slowly into the wood it contacts, eventually ruining glue joints and what not.

The method one article I found recommended was to first clean the soft tissue of by boiling the bone in hot water for an hour or two, either just water from the tap or in a solution of mild detergent or household armonia. The degrease the bone for 1-3 weeks in Coleman's Fuel while changing the fuel every now and then.

As the bone didn't have any soft tissue on it, I decided to skip the first part and go straight to the degreasing.

I got my Coleman's Fuel from a local sports shop that have a lot of camping gear. I read that it had to be done in a 1-10 volumes but I didn't have a jar that was big enough so I winged it a little and hoped I would be able to compensate with longer degreasing and a few more changes of fuel.

I put all the pieces into the biggest glass jar I had and filled it up to the brim. It immediately started to go cloudy from all the grease released from the surface of the bone. A day later all the residue had settled at the bottom and the fuel had gone clear again.

After 10 days or so I shook it all up again to see that the fuel had gone so cloudy it was almost impossible to see the bone clearly. I changed the fuel, wiped the bone as clean and dry as I could with a rag, put them back in and refilled the jar for a second round. This time there was considerable less grease showing, though still enough to be clearly visible. This cycle was repeated three times.

After thirty days there didn't seem to be anymore grease coming off the bone, or at least the fuel seemed to be as clear as it was when it came from the can. I took the bone out and to my surprise they still felt a little greasy to the touch, but I decided to leave them to dry and inspect them closer.

Once dry they had gone considerably whiter than before. However, I noticed that while some pieces were a quite uniform white, others had darker translucent spots on them. I don't have anything to compare this with but it appeared that despite my efforts they still had residue left in them, particularly the nuts. What to do? Could it be that I should not have skipped the boiling part after all? Was it simply a matter of the pieces lying to close together in the jar?

Regardless, I decided to start again with the degreasing process, but first all nuts and saddles were prepped by filing and sanding the rough and uneven faces clean, so at least three faces were clean and flat leaving them as big as possible for final fitting later. The tie block inlays got worked on all four sides to a 2x2mm square stick. The inlay pieces also got sanded to a 1mm thickness.

SECOND TIME AROUND
Let's do it...... in a pot with one gallon of water and 1 tsp of concentrated dish washing liquid. I put the bone in the cold water, brought the water to a boil and turned the heat down and let it simmer for and hour and a half. 1 tsp of detergent was maybe a little too much in this case, since the bone had already gone through some degreasing, but then again maybe not. The 'stew' gave off a lot of foam in the beginning, but at the end there was only little of it left.

When done I took the bone out and dried it with some paper towel. The bone seemed to be a more uniform white than before which I took to be a good thing.

The bone was left to dry for four days and then put in a jar again with some Coleman's fuel for yet another two rounds of degreasing, one week per round. I wasn't able to see any residue in the fuel after either cycles. I looked as clear as if it was straight from the can.

THE FINAL RESULT
As an experiment, I left a nut and a saddle out of the cooking process and subjected them only to the last two cycles of degreasing in fuel in a separate jar. For what it is worth they continued to be darker and show more discoloration after the final degreasing process than the bone pieces that was cooked in the detergent solution. However, like the case with the cooked bone pieces, there was no visible traces of oils in the fuel afterwards in either degreasing cycles.

I'm a little uneasy about the whole thing. First of all, how do I know for sure that all the grease has gone? Some of the bone pieces still show a little discoloration, but I don't know if that is just the natural color of the bone or if it is oils still left in there. I somehow doubt that letting them sit in fuel for longer will change this, since they have already been in there for much longer than recommended, but what do I know.

Second, as evident in some of the photos below, small pores are showing in a number of the pieces, which I don't believe is a desirable thing if density is something of importance. In most cases the pieces are clean and solid looking, but in others pores are showing here and there which I hope to be able to work around. In a few the pores cover most of the surfaces and I wonder if I would be best off discarding them or using them for something entirely different.

I don't think I am going to use the 1mm flat pieces for inlay. They are very translucent and textures and colors from the wood it is laid into will likely show through the bone. I should either have kept them thicker, or perhaps bone is not really well suited for the purpose in the first place.

ADDENDUM
A couple of weeks after I wrote this post I decided to go through the degreasing process yet one more time. Despite the fact that the fuel didn't appear to extract any more grease from the bone pieces during that last couple of soaking cycles, it still bothered me that a few of the pieces displayed translucent spots on them. And so I repeated the whole process of boiling in soapy water for 2 hours, drying for three days, three weeks of soaking in fuel in three one week cycles.

If they are not clean by now, I don't know what it takes to get them to be....................

RAW BONE PIECES

CUTTING BONE

CUTTING TIE BLOCK INLAYS

ROUGH CUT NUTS, SADDLES AND TIE BLOCK INLAYS

DEGREASING BONE IN COLEMAN'S FUEL

DEGREASING BONE - AFTER 10 DAYS

DEGREASING BONE - AFTER 20 DAYS

DEGREASING BONE - AFTER 30 DAYS

BONE WITH GREASE RESIDUE OR DISCOLORATION

ROUGH SHAPING NUTS

SANDING NUTS TO SHAPE

BOILING ALL THE PIECES

FINAL DEGREASING - AFTER 45 DAYS

THE DEGREASED BONE PIECES

THE DEGREASED BONE SAMPLES:
UNCOOKED, HOMOGENEOUS AND POROUS

MORE SAMPLES:
UNCOOKED, POROUS AND HOMOGENOUS

BONEHENGE ........

........ IN MOONLIGHT

BINDING GAP REPAIR

After lots of research and speculation I have decided to try and repair a small gap that occurred in the first binding/purfling strip I added. Actually, it's two gaps, each about 0.5 wide, one between the binding and purfling and one around the rosewood veneer line between the purfling and the soundboard.

Had it only been a gap between the binding and purfling, the matter would have been much easier to resolve as I could just have filled the gap with sawdust and glue. But, it's the gap around the rosewood line that bothers me. If I was to fill that I would give a visual appearance of the line growing twice as thick for about 1" and slimming down again to it's normal size. Not good. The question next was how to to fix it.

A LITTLE RESEARCH
I had numerous correspondences with fellow forum members as well as a telephone conversation. Several suggestions as how to fix the problem were mentioned. One was to just add some more glue and clamp the binding in. Another was to make some sort of space at the end of the binding, heat it all up to soften the glue, move the binding into place and reclamping it. Yet another, a variation of the second one, but also adding fresh glue before clamping it.

To figure out how Titebond glue would react to heat I ended up calling Franklin International's, the manufacturer of the Titebond glues, tech support to get the inside scoop. A very friendly tech person informed me that all the Titebond glues does indeed do work as hot melt glues and not only once as some had suggested, but repeatedly so. He recommended heating the glue to a temperature around 240-250º F for best results. I asked if it would be necessary to add more glue to which he responded that as long as there was glue in the joint in the first place adding extra glue shouldn't be needed.

MUCK UPS
I did two little muck ups to run experiments on. One was a 4" long replica of a side with lining and soundboard attached, including binding a purlings with gaps like on the real guitar. The only difference was that I it made from walnut/walnut/spruce rather than bubinga/mahogany/spruce and that it was straight. Otherwise it was dimensioned pretty accurately and it was glued together with the same glue. The other muck up was just some binding I had glued to a piece of bubinga. The idea was to start practicing on the latter just to get a feel for how much heat I need to supply to get the glue soft and then move on to the more elaborate one for a complete trial run.

During the process I tried to reclamp part of the binding just as it was and another part with extra glue added. For some reason I had better luck with getting the binding to stick when I added more glue. I don't know exactly why that was, but I speculated that it may have been because I didn't keep it clamped long enough for the glue to cool down and solidify. Or, maybe I didn't heat it up enough to properly melt and therefore not being able to adhere properly when it got clamped again. Who knows, but because of this I decided that it was probably best to move ahead with the job by trying to open the joint up a little and add more glue.

DOING IT
After some serious procrastination, I took the plunge and got on with it. I opted to drill two small 1/8" holes, one for the purfling and one at the binding centered around 6mm, 1/4", from the side of the neck. This allowed for 1mm for the neck still to have to come off in the final carving process, 1.5mm of slope in the heel from the top to the bottom of the binding, 1.5mm radius of the drill bit and still have at least a 2mm thick wall between the hole and the heel.

I carefully started drilling a shallow hole for the purfling, though it ended up a little deeper from the repeated attempts to get a decent photograph of the process, and a slightly deeper hole for the binding matching it's width. I used my caliper to measure the progress by sticking the depth measuring blade into the hole. I used a hand drill for this which worked really well for this with it's slow operation; No unpleasant surprises of the bit suddenly digging in and coming through the neck.

Next came the softening of the glue. I was very nervous about this. Not that it would be difficult to heat up the glue for the binding, but because I was afraid of heating up the glue around the linings too, weakening the joint between the soundboard and sides.

With the tip of a household iron I began to heat up the binding, being as careful as possible to keep the iron on the binding only and not overheat the area in general. It's a good idea to empty the iron before doing this to prevent the water from the iron to spill all over. Don't ask me how I know this. With a drill bit inserted into the hole I gently tried to pry the binding away from the neck to create a small gap in the joint where I could squeeze in some more glue. But, that didn't do the trick. Instead of the binding on the body opening up, the little bit of binding left on the other side of the hole gave way.

Instead I resorted to just heating up binding to soften the glue around the gap and reclamping the bugger in place.

RECLAMPING
I made as small semi circular cork lined caul out of MDF, that fitted the diameter of the soundhole. I used a flycutter for this. I don't really like using flycutters but the tool worked really well for this application, as the bevelled end of the cutter created a little lip that held the caul in place an prevented it from falling though the soundhole. I did a few dry runs before the real deal, to figure out which clamps to use and where to put them. I found that using three wooden cam clamps covered the troubled area pretty well.

Once that was sorted out, I reheated the binging again as before, added a little bit of fresh glue on the gap and scraped as much glue as I could down into it with an old credit card and added the first clamp furthest away from the neck. This pushed the binding in place where the clamp was and opened up the gap a little more in front of it. This procedure was repeated for the second clamp, though the gap in front of the clamp did not seem to widen further when it went on.

The third clamp went on about less than 1" away from the neck and managed to close the last bit of the gap. I wasn't able to detect whether the end of the binding had moved further in to it's pocket in the neck or not, but speculated that it must have done just that and it only a very small forward movement was needed to press the binding in place. The three clamps were left in place overnight for the repair to dry.

Once the clamps were off, the binding was scraped flush with the sides and the clue was cleaned up on the top. On close inspection of the repair revealed that the binding was as good as new. I was still able to trace an approximately 0.2mm gap on one side of the rosewood veneer line but it was a lot less than before and not something I think anyone will notice unless you know it's there.

All in all I was quite pleased with the end result, particular in the light that this it was a task I dreaded doing and one that had been hanging over me for a some time.

Onto the fingerboard....

BINDING GAP

BINDING GAP CLOSE UP

MUCK UPS

MAKING SPACE FOR THE BINDINGS TO MOVE INTO

HEATING THE BINDING

REGLUING THE BINDING

SCRAPING BINDING AND PURFLING FLUSH

THE FINISHED REPAIR