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uncle.fogey - Posted - 05/30/2012: 17:03:06
I was going to make the fingerboard a separate thread, but it’s so much a part of the neck, I decided to keep it as part of the neck thread.
You may remember earlier, when I explained how to calculate the fret spacings. I make a print-out of the fingerboard diagram I made on the computer:
Now I cut out that printout with an X-acto knife and paste it on to a fingerboard blank with “Super 77” spray adhesive:
I sand the edges of the fingerboard exactly along the paper pattern and straighten the edges on my dead flat surface:
Then, I use a fret saw, which is a backsaw with a .023 kerf, which has a stop fence to limit depth:
I clamp the fingerboard onto my workbench and cut directly on the lines of the printout with the fret saw:
After the slots are cut, I paint the paper pattern with lacquer thinner, which releases it, and I can easily scrape it off with a chisel:
Now I have a fingerboard blank with perfectly cut fret slots:
I wipe both the front and back with lacquer thinner to get any oil off the surface of the wood, which will help with gluing later on.
At this point, I have to decide what kind of inlay pattern(s) I want. While I am using a hand saw for fret slot cutting, I use a computer a lot to help with inlay patterns. I can visualize them easily.
Sorry for the art history , but I spend a lot of time doing research and making drawings. If I was doing dots and stars, I would not have to do any of this, but I'm trying to do something unusual, yet within the traditional historical context of banjos.
Going back to the resonator flange, I had created a kind of “Gothic tracery” with the quatrefoils - I want all the parts of these banjos to relate and hang together. The color and patina will help a lot:
One of my design motifs will definitely be Gothic or medieval - here is some medieval decorative design - remarkably fresh and exuberant:
As part of my research, I discovered that there are old medieval decorations that look remarkably like familiar banjo inlay patterns.
Look at this pattern, painted on purlins on a church in England built in 1500, next to a Gibson Granada - everything that goes around, comes around:
The medieval designs are pretty straightforward, and I think they lend themselves to banjo inlays:
One of the things they did really well in that period (better than any other time) was stone and wood carving. Grape vines and oak leaves were a favorite motif, and I think this would lend itself to a banjo: If the armor in the middle ages has never been equaled since in terms of metal working, these stone carvings are the apex of that craft as well.
Think of what a great heel carving you could do - I made a sketch:
On the same theme, I made another sketch of a grapevine fingerboard, using MOP and colored Corian, which I think would be pretty neat - I incorporated the quatrefoils into it:
Beyond that,
I have made a lot of fingerboards using tree and bird motifs with early 20th century “Arts-and-Crafts” style, and I think I’m going to make a fingerboard with these patterns. These pattens are simple, friendly and graphic. I always make the top of the tree from green abalone.
Then there’s the “Space Cadet” motif, which I like a lot. We’ve all seen banjos with stars and moons - this one has stars, moons, Jupiter, Saturn, eclipses, and I was thinking of a black hole.
Obviously, the peghead will have the Sun.
This is a lot of info - sorry about the art history. Next will be inlaying, fretting, binding, fingerboard crossbanding, peghead crossbanding, peghead shaping, neck shaping - will it ever be finished?.
uncle.fogey - Posted - 06/08/2012: 17:24:53
I didn’t mention this before, but I don’t buy fingerboard blanks, I look on the internet and elsewhere for 2” wide thick slabs of rosewood or ebony and cut them down into slats for fingerboards. Since I make a lot of longnecks, I need pieces that are 25” long, otherwise 20” pieces would be fine.
Here’s a picture of a piece of ebony capable of making many fingerboards- I've already used half of it up:
I have made drawings and computer facsimilies of my designs. I will print these out and use the drawings as guides and outlines as patterns for cutting MOP:
Now, you need to have a good jeweler’s saw. I have one that I have used for 45 years, and I think they are still available from jewelry making supply houses - get a good one - it’s worth it.
You clamp the blade in one end, push against it with your body, and clamp the other end in. When you let the pressure off, the blade is tight like a banjo string - “ping”.i779.photobucket.com/albums/yy...uence.jpg" style="width: 443px; height: 1023px;" />
Then you paste the inlay outlines on to the MOP pieces with Super 77 spray adhesive, and super glue the MOP onto either thin pieces of wood or, some other material - I use a pattern-makers’ material called “REN”.
This allows you to work with a larger piece, which is easier to handle, and stops the MOP from breaking. I drill tiny holes in the corners of intricate pieces with a carbide miniature router bit - .031”. This makes it easier to go around inside corners, which is a jeweler’s saw blade-breaker:
I make a “V-block, and clamp it to a table in a well-lighted area, then cut out the pieces. You may have to file some rough areas with needle files:
If you are going to do this by hand, cut the corners in and make it LOOK like it was done by hand - the robotic laser cut inlays are SO horsey and crappy looking compared to the real thing- I can see it from 10 feet away, so can anyone else who knows what they are looking at - here’s a comparative pic:
Since the MOP is expensive, it’s handy to keep all the scrap pieces and try to use them as well as you can:
I have always thought that the Gibson ”Flying Eagle” pattern (which is my favorite one) was so goofy and historically inexplicable, that they had to have designed it so they could re-use negative area scraps, but I can’t find any validity to that idea. If you can figure out how to do that, it would be a great idea!
When you cut mirror images, a lot of people stack the MOP and cut 2 out at once. I like both pieces to be from the same piece of MOP, so I cut them separately - I want them to match in color and “grain” - call me picky:
So now I have all the piece cut out for 2 fingerboards. This took about 4-6 hours, for what it’s worth:
Next, I’ll actually inlay them.
uncle.fogey - Posted - 06/11/2012: 18:43:29
Now that all the inlays are cut out, you have to trace their outlines onto the fingerboard.
I ought to mention that these fingerboards are made from a dense, nearly black native American wood that sinks in water, is harder and denser than African ebony, is not endangered or protected and is sustainable. I got some pieces from a hangout member.
I also have some Brazilian Rosewood I have had for 45 years, long before it was taken off the market, which I use to make fingerboards. I do not intend ongoing, to use any kind of “controversial” wood in what I make, unless it’s old stock I already have, like the rosewood - I also have some old maccassar ebony, and some teak recycled from packing crates from imported motorcycles, and a bunch of 35 year-old pattern-grade Honduras mahogany.
Having said that, the ebony is very dark, so I trace the inlays with a hard white pencil. I use Prismacolor “Verithins” - DO NOT use the soft kind, they won’t work properly. I sharpen them with an X-acto knife:
It’s important to get the outlines traced very close to the pearl and hold the pearl down firmly with an awl while you are tracing them.
Then I use 3 different router bits in a drill press: I set the drill press to cut just a little less than the thickness of the MOP, which is .060”. I hog out as much of each shape as I can with the 1/8” one STAYING WITHIN THE WHITE LINES
Then I go down to the 1/16 bit, and check each inlay for fit, correcting it a little. I use the tiny bit just for sharp corners and precise fitting:
When they fit, I glue them in with a few drops of super glue, then I mix up a little polyester resin with some iron oxide pigment. black red and yellow will match just about any wood i the resin is gray and I use red hardener o of course, you could mix sawdust with this if you wanted. super glue and sawdust works, too, tinted epoxy or shellac sticks - this is the way I do it and it works for me:
I smear this down into the space around the inlays with a plastic or wood spatula, being sure to really get it down in:
Then When it’s still a little soft, I clean out the fret slots with an X-acto knife, then after it gets hard -10-15 minutes, I sand it flat using sanding blocks and successively finer sandpaper - this is your chance to get it really smooth:
If you were going to make a radiused fingerboard, this would be when you did it, using radiused sanding blocks - here’s a 16” Radius one I used on a guitar fingerboard recently:
Even with sanding blocks, you are going to wind up with a SLIGHT crown anyway - like a 60” radius - you don’t want it to be concave.
So, this one’s finished for now:
I’ll go on to the next one, which has a few different things happening:
uncle.fogey - Posted - 06/13/2012: 15:47:01
As I said earlier, the medieval or Gothic fingerboard has a few different things happening:
For one thing, I have quatrefoil shapes that can be cut with a drill, I have stars, which are trickier than you might imagine, and I have to make a TEENY-WEENIE abalone diamond.
So, I rout them out just like the bird inlays, but now I can use a brad point drill to make the quatrefoils (so I think):
As it turns out, I still have to clean it up and level it with the 1/8” router bit, so I should have just done it like that in the first place.
With the intricate inlays, you have to be very careful and stay within the white lines you have drawn. It takes a lot of “back-and-forths, but just take off a little at a time, and don’t try to force the inlay - you will break it for sure. In the middle of the 5th fret inlay, I want to put an abalone diamond. This little bugger is VERY difficult, much more than you would imagine - it takes a lot of filing, and I lost the first one on the floor and never found it again:
Finally, I have them all in, glued in with super glue, the gaps filled with my bondo-iron oxide mix, and I have sanded them down.
I am sorry that the color of these cannot be represented properly digitally- it all looks white. The actual color is very iridescent and lively. I think the contrast between the MOP and abalone shows a little on these images:
Now on to a painful thing - I HATE to repair something I just did, but I didn’t like the birds at the 12th fret - that’s the octave - I thought that if I made them from abalone, they’d be colorful and stand out more, but they didn’t (maybe a bad piece of abalone?) - I need to replace them with gold MOP. If there’s anything we all need to keep in mind, it’s ”don’t fall in love with your own work” - if it’s not right, fix it - we have to be professional.
So, here we go - I have to dig them out and replace them - It’s painful and embarrassing, but this is the time to do it, before the frets are installed. One thing you learn if you ever have to take apart your own work, is how well you did it. Let me say that cutting out these inlays is much more difficult than doing it in the first place - they were “in there” Cutting out these prearl inlays is like having teeth drilled (UGH):
So now the deed is done, it looks MUCH BETTER, and I have two finished fingerboards:
The next thing will be fretting and binding.
BPorter - Posted - 06/14/2012: 04:24:19
quote:
Originally posted by Fathand
There is an old technique where you cut right through the fingerboard as with a coping or jewellers saw. The fingerboard would have to be a similar thickness to the inlays or they would have to be shimmed up to the level of the board. I believe this is one reason some old fingerboards are so thin. The other option would be careful work with chisels and the like.
quote:
Originally posted by aeroweenie
Good stuff! How would one rout for inlays without a router, drill press, Dremel, etc.?
Pre-War Gibson and other companies did it like that way back when...they used a poplar backing substrate glued to the mother of pearl and abalone blanks and cut a whole through their peghead veneers and fingerboards. They removed the substrate for the peghead overlays since the inlay was about the same thickness as the veneer. They retained the substrate backing on the inlays for the fingerboards....back in the days before the CNC stuff!
Bill Porter
uncle.fogey - Posted - 06/14/2012: 17:03:15
The next thing that has to happen is the frets.
The first thing is to “chase” the fret slots to get out any residue left in the slots from the inlaying - I use the fret saw for this even one goober in one of the slots will stop the fret from going down all the way, so this is very important:
After that, you get everything together - the fret wire, wire cutters, a mahogany block, and a deadblow hammer:
You cut the frets a little longer than they need to be, tap them into place with the deadblow hammer, and then really pound them in using the mahogany block - you may need to dress this block a couple of times If your inlays are not bedded properly, you might crack one, so be aware:
After all the frets are in, I check to make sure they are all down snugly against the surface of the fingerboard, then I dress the edges (carefully) with a disc sander:
Pounding them in has made the fingerboard “backbow” - don’t be concerned about this - this is as it should be and this will be corrected later when we glue up the whole fingerboard, and later the neck - we'
re not there yet. straightening the fingerboard by laminating it compresses the fret slots more, locking the frets in more tightly:
I mentioned earlier that you will get a really slight radius - 60” - here you can see that. When we are finished, we won't really have to level or dress the fingerboard more than a minimal amount.
Now you file the corners of the frets JUST to the corner of the fingerboard - don’t go farther - it will mess up the binding:
Finally you glue on the binding, after heat-bending the binding to fit around around the 5th fret part. I use a simple plywood form and a heat gun for this - it takes less than a minute:
It's glued on using clamps and cauls - I made a simple jig for this:
And there it is - In the bottom picture, you can see I have made 2 different designs for the 5th fret section - these will become more apparent in the neck shaping.
Of course, we have to scrape this a little to clean up the glue.
uncle.fogey - Posted - 06/17/2012: 17:08:15
Now I have 2 fingerboards, inlayed, fretted, and bound.
I’m going to step back momentarily to when I laminated the necks with cross-banding:
I’m going to do the same thing with the fingerboards (peg-heads and heel caps, for that matter). The cross banding does 3 things:
(1) It gives me another strip to glue the fingerboard on to in order to equalize the back bow, and further lock the frets.
(2) It makes the fingerboard assembly stronger and more stable
(3) It acts as decorative purfling.
You can glue these up in any way - here’s a group of them - you can make them any way you want:
Since I have bound these fingerboards, and I like the bindings "unsullied", I hate to drill holes into it for side-dots (which I consider to be a nuisance), so I’m going to design or engineer my fingerboard cross-banding so that it also acts as side-markers, sparing the bindings.
This is tough, and tedious, but it looks great when it is finished. Here’s an idea of what it looks like in a simple form on a Vega neck - I sometimes make models or "maquettes" of what some particular detail will look like - these can be useful for explaining things to a client:
Here are some shots of the lamination in process. Every piece has to be cut to line up with the frets when it’s all done:
When they are all glued up, they look like this
While I have all the strips, and the glue, I’m doing a lamination for under the peghead veneer and the heel cap, too:
The peghead veneer will go on top of this, and I am going to make the peghead veneers next.
uncle.fogey - Posted - 06/23/2012: 16:50:08
I broke my finger -UGH,
so I made a splint for it - don't want to go to the ER and get it Xrayed, they'll do the same thing as I did - splint and some Advil:
Broken finger or not, the order of process with which I am building these necks, requires me to complete the peghead veneers now.
I have been putting that off because it’s tedious, yet important, because the peg head is the “signature” of the banjo
Apropos of that, here’s a picture of a 1927 Gibson peg head and a 2003 one - has craftsmanship improved in that 80 years? Shameful.
At this point, I am making 2 necks - a “birds-and-trees” motif reminiscent of early 1900s arts-and-crafts style, and a “medieval” straightforward one, right out of the 13th century. I like the simple directness and traditionalist nature of both styles - makes you realize that nothing is new.
I have to make 2 pegheads - one that goes with the birds and trees neck, and one that goes with the medieval one.
I have my own peghead shape that I am going to use:
I want to use beech burl with one, and a bookmatch dark rosewood with the other.
I have been struggling with this.
Here are a few design ideas I have been contemplating:
Finally, I narrowed down to 2 designs:
I’m going to make the green parts of the bird one from dyed sycamore , and the bird itself from 2-tone gold MOP, The rest will be bookmatched Brazilian rosewood (which I’ve had in the shop since 1964.
The reasoning is that the rosewood doesn’t need stain, so the green dyed sycamore will not need to be sealed off or protected.
For the medieval one, I’m using a bookmatched beech burl, and MOP. The burl will need to be stained darker, but that will not affect the MOP.
The real star of this one, will be the quatrefoil, which will be cut all the way through the peghead revealing the colored cross banding as a decorative element.
For the bird one, I have made black-and white artwork, which I will use to cut the inlay:
I am making the bird veneer from the Brazilian rosewood, and I rip it into thin slats with the bandsaw and book-match the slats.
This is exactly how I would cut fingerboard blanks out of a piece of ebony or rosewood.
I have also cut out the LeVan logo lettering and the medieval flowers from MOP:
Likewise. I cut the pieces for the medieval peghead veneer from the burl:
The next step will be to do the bird parquetry - have to rest my finger.
uncle.fogey - Posted - 06/28/2012: 16:23:53
Now I have one peghead veneer finished and I am starting the other one.
QUESTION***
This neck thread is onto 4 pages, and there are a LOT of pictures -should I break these down more into more sections? I’m assuming everyone likes big pictures because you can see things better, but they are slow to load.
Still remaining on #11 the neck thread are the following sub-topics:
The peghead veneers (in progress)
Shaping the peghead
Spikes
5th string pip
The nut space and nut
Gluing on the fingerboard
Shaping the neck
Heel cutting
Fitting and aligning the neck to the pot
Dowel stick making and installation
That’s a lot of stuff - I wonder if I should break it down more.
Meanwhile, I’m going to proceed as I have been unless I hear otherwise. I know people are looking at this, but I don’t get that many questions, so I’m operating on my own here. trying to make it interesting.
Having said that, here’s where we are, design wise - a computer drawing, and I’ve shown the one on the right:
Here’s a picture of an OLD Epiphone peghead from the jazz era, before the days of epoxy resin, using solid ebony for peghead veneers, etc.
That’s the kind of traditional woodwork I like, and I’m attempting to continue this , but I’m trying to design a more contemporary vein, even though my models may be 15th century.
I am VERY respectful of, but don’t want to copy the old stuff unless it’s a restoration or conversion - I would do anything to replace a missing part in a valuable old instrument. Just watch Andy De Paule’s video of a guy in Viet Nam engraving a Vega Gryphon by hand. You can buy one of them from him for less than $30 - they are hand made, honestly, by skilled people, who are more skilled than I am, and Andy is an upstanding, moral, and honest guy. Do I want to make inlays like that to save $28? could I do it better so you’d be able to tell it was made by hand? I am a “make it yourself nut”, and will handcraft virtually anything to replace machines with handcraft - call me John Henry, but in this case, to quote Bob Dylan “It ain’t me babe”.
ENOUGH - Pick your battles - this isn’t one I could win, or even believe I should fight.
SO, I made the medieval one with the burl veneer, which you saw already.
Now for the bird one, with the rosewood veneer - I am using a chartreuse dyed sycamore veneer made in France .
This veneer is .9mm thick and needs backing. I use a material called “REN”, which has replaced mahogany as a patternmaker’s material (remember the mahogany crossbanding on the old Epiphone peghead)
I glue the dyed sycamore to this with superglue - Grizzly “Insta bond” which I buy in 4 oz bottles.,
IF I was going to use a poplar cross band, I would run it perpendicular to the dyed sycamore and glue it with Titebond I (red label)
Then, I paste my pattern onto that with super 77 and paste THAT onto the rosewood peghead veneer, and cut them out together. You can use a jewler’s saw. I am using a scroll saw with a Hekules #1blade
Theoretically, they ought to line up.
You make a TINY jigsaw puzzle - you have to put all the pieces together and bond them with filler before you lose them:
I am staining the burl here:
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