Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Hello again everyone,
I apologize for the long delay since my last post. I had a business trip down to sunny Florida last week and I spent the whole time pining for my banjo!
Anyway, I spent the last 2 evenings creating the fingerboard for the new banjo, and I'm happy to say that the epoxy is drying and I should have a nice fingerboard firmly in place tomorrow.
Last night I went back and forth between my current open-backed Rogue, the plans found in the back of Roger Siminoff's "Building a Five String Banjo", and Stew Mac's fret calculator. I ended up going with the Stew Mac calculations in millimeters because I found it easiest to work with. The scale is different on my Rogue, with the neck being at least an inch longer so I felt like I was working blind. I guess if it all went poorly, my bridge will be a little higher up on the pot than normal.
I used a 24" metal ruler (the metric side) and a clear plastic triangle I had sitting around to draw the lines out on the fingerboard. I measured it, remeasured it, drew the lines, and then remeasured it again!
Tonight, I sat down at my workbench and started cutting the slots. I was really nervous about it at first because from everything I read, it sounded like brain surgery! I was happily surprised to find out after my first few, that it wasn't as terrible as it seemed. It's tough though and you need to keep a steady hand on the first few passes of each slot.
I had my father's help along with the use of his router table and a hand plane to create a sort of miter box to hold the fingerboard in place. I did not however have anything to help me hold the saw blade so that it was not at an angle. I don't think I honestly would have been able to do it without the miter box, and the miter-box that you can get at Stew-Mac might have been worth the money, but I got cheap and decided to risk it.
I did however get their fret saw with the depth guage, which I think was definitely a requirement since the fret slot needs to be a specific width. While I did my best with the depth guage, I have a feeling that there will be some that I need to make a bit deeper in order to fully seat the fret. Be careful if you try this at home! I had a tendency to push down on the end with the handle making the cut on the side closest to me deeper than the far side. I also noticed that if it feels like it's starting to bind up, it's because the blade is at an angle and you need to back off. Once you get the first few cuts done, the blade fits nicely into the slot and it's pretty smooth sailing from there.
After I cut the slots, I fit it onto the neck and positioned it as best I could. It was hard to figure out what perpendicular was because the neck is tapered and not a good edge to line it up at the top where the nut goes and then flipped the neck over and sort of centered the fingerboard at both the top and the heel. I then clamped it on and traced out the profile of the neck onto the fingerboard.
With the shape of the neck laid out, I laid the fingerboard face down on the bench and clamped down the heel end. I then took the jigsaw and rough cut the fingerboard (always keeping at least 1/16" from the actual line I traced out.
Using a tip I picked up from the Siminoff book, I drove in 2 very small tacks into the neck leaving a tiny bit protruding from the top and then positioned the fingerboard back into place. I tapped the fingerboard a few times so that the head of the tack would mark the back of the fingerboard. I then drilled out 2 shallow holes in the back of the fingerboard to accomodate the heads of these 2 tacks. This will prevent the fingerboard from sliding around when clamped and drying.
I finally ran a strip of masking tape over the channel where my truss rod i
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