When last photographed the neck it was just about to go into the clamps, and I mentioned a bit of a problem...
Pretty much the only part of the rough cut fretboard that actually concaved in managed to slip over the edge of the matai slightly
I had miles of overlap to play with.. I must have bumped it as it was going into the sandwich, but I didn't notice til it had been clamped for about an hour.
Bugger.
I've decided to meet it halfway, by thinning the width down by about 1mm (0.5mm off either side), and filling the rest. It's on the underside of the neck so the fill shouldn't be too obvious. I'm just glad I hadn't cut the neck pocket in the templates, I'll be able to use the thinner neck to set up the routing template.
Repositioned neck template:
resulting first cut:
Forgot to take one of the trim, still a small indentation there but a combination of sanding and a little fill will take care of it.
The fretboard:
Not the prettiest fretboard ever, but it does kind of remind me of the Canterbury Plains on a nor'west day
So I've got one of these things. My non-Dremel tool fits it, but it's a bit of a piece of junk. The Dremel fitting is not much better, sadly, it certainly isn't any pretender to a Stewmac router base (one day
). One of the difficulties is its lack of precision, and I need to be as precise as I can with the inlay work. Time to see if this thing can be made to work a little better for my needs. A contributor to the lack of precision is the travel distance of the plunge. Because of those giant springs, it doesn't like to plunge smoothly at the best of times, and the height of the travel is about double that of my 3/8 router.
I take it to bits and grease some stuff up a bit:
Then I cut a couple of bits of tent pole (the tent is stuffed, by the way, it got all bent up by one of those Canterbury Plains nor'westers
) :
And I get travel limiters:
Travel is now down to about 1/2".
So next, inlays!
But more on that tomorrow (wish I had more time after work!!)
