Making the fingerboard

With the peghead fixed to my satisfaction, I turn to the fingerboard. I am using an African ebony fingerboard on this guitar. I plan to bind it with the same flamed maple I used for the body.

The first step was to plane off the tool marks from the fingerboard blank. I stuck it to the top of my workbench using a piece of double-sided tape and went at it with my #4 Bailey plane. In a matter of minutes, the floor was covered in black shavings. After getting top surface of the board nearly smooth, I used a cabinet scraper to finish it up. I turned the board over and did the same to the other side.

I picked a top surface and sanded the bottom on a sanding board to make sure the glued surface was perfectly flat. I marked a straight line along one edge and used a block plane to make the edge straight and smooth. Finally, I marked a line for the nut that was exactly 90 degrees to the side I planed smooth.

With the board smooth and flat, I marked out the fret scale.



















I clamped the board to my sanding board and used the fret rule I bought from Stew-Mac. I am using the Martin short scale (24.9 inches) on this guitar.

I clamped the rule so the mark for the nut was on the line I scribed. Using an exacto-knife, I cut a little notch at each fret. When I had all 20 frets marked, I removed the ruler and used an engineers square to scribe each fret mark across the face of the board.

With all of the fret positions marked, I clamped the board in my miter box and sawed each fret.



With the frets cut, I then moved on to cutting a radius into the top surface of the fingerboard. The radius is there to make fretting the strings across the board easier for the player. The jig I use holds the fingerboard on an arm that rotates. The arm is mounted under the router.

The depth of the router is set to just rest on the surface of the fingerboard while it is centered. The arm is rotated slightly, and the router is passed up and down the length of the board. The arm is rotated some more, and the router is passed up and down. The process is repeated until the entire surface of the fingerboard has been cut.