It’s been a few days or so since the last update, partially due to other commitments, and partially due to not really completing any single thing to the point that I’d post about it.
As I left things last, the neck needs fret markers and radiusing (and mebbe binding). The fret markers need to be done prior to binding, so I have been looking into that.
Fret markers, as noted earlier, are there to indicate which fret is which – handy when fretting chords halfway up the neck, at least for hack guitarists like myself. Almost always these are contrasting wood, mother-of-pearl, or plastic dots like these on my strat:
I would love to do something fancier, but don’t want to ruin the neck at this point. So I grabbed some spare wood and tried a couple of things out.
The round dot is simply a maple plug drilled out of some wood left over from the neck; it is glued into a matching hole drilled into the fretboard. The other two monstrosities might still work out if I can get better at it. The intent is to make a 1950’s-ish retro icon, along the lines of something like:
The technique is to carefully (i.e. more carefully than I did above…) cut out the shape you want as the dot, then fill it with a suitable material. This could be epoxy, or in the case above, I packed the cavity with baking soda and dripped superglue in there. The far left effort used a different glue, not so super. The better one in the middle was with industrial CA glue, and is quite hard. I might have had more beer than patience in me while drilling and cutting out the test shapes, I must admit.
It looks like the fill technique would work though, and using either epoxy or CA glue, I can also add dyes, so the dots could be more colorful. I’ve also ordered a jeweler’s saw to try cutting out inlay shapes, so obviously a fair bit of practice is needed before committing to the actual neck. I would probably be prudent to just go with inlaid dots…those could be dyed as well, I suppose.
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