Fingerboard progress

So I made a little more progress on the latest guitar. First, I worked on the neck. I added a couple of locating pins to make gluing the fingerboard easier. I made the pins from a finishing nail that I clipped to a couple of quarter inch pieces, then smoothed the ends with a file. If you look carefully, you can see the holes I drilled in the first and 13th fret slots.

With the locating pin holes drilled, I moved on to fretting the fingerboard. Now, I have read a couple of different ways to do this, but a Canadian luthier named Mario Proulx described a real interesting method. First, you fret the fingerboard off the neck. I like this part because its so easy to ding the neck if you fret after the FB is glued on. The FB will bow back from the frets spreading the slots apart. To fix this I use a clamp to force the FB back to flat. The picture shows how I left things the first few hours. I had to put much greater force on it to get things flat. I cranked the clamp down and left it overnight. The next day things were back to flat!














With the fingerboard pretty much done, I sawed the neck to the rough shape. This is one of those jobs that make me wish I had a band saw!














And here is where I stop until I close up the body. The next step will be to route the tenon, and I need to reference the angle of the heel from the body.