OK, it’s time to get to the scary stuff. There are differing opinions regarding the order of radiusing, fretting and carving the neck profile, but I decided to go with radiusing first (mostly because I was more scared of the carving…).
Earlier I built the radiusing block; here it is again, with sandpaper double-side-taped (woohoo!) to it. The idea is to sand away the fretboard until it’s a nice, straight, radiused board…
Bonafide luthiers would be wincing right now, as sanding a flat fretboard down to radius it probably the worst way to do it. If you do any regular guitar building, jigs using power sanders or routers make way more sense, or by hand, planers and actual woodworking skill is better.
But, I’m looking at a quantity of one (at least for now), so I’ll do it the wrong way.
A big issue with hand sanding the radius in is how do you make sure you are sanding in a perfectly straight line? Especially when the neck is already tapered? Maybe I should have radiused it before I tapered it from nut to heel? Hmm, lemme think about that one…
OK – I take my original neck tapering blank that I made to transfer the desired taper to the actual neck, and tablesaw it right down the middle. I flip the two resulting pieces around, attach ’em to a sheet of pressboard in order to hold the tapered neck in place…
I add a couple guide beams to the jig, one on either side of the neck, and place them so they are parallel to the neck’s center line, and set so that the sanding block will ride between them almost snugly…
So now I sand… Starting with 80 grit, this gets me to a roughly radiused board after much sweat…
I prudently decide to keep some of the sanding dust for possible future use (smart move, it turns out). I switch from 80 grit to 100, 150, 220 and finally 320 grit to get to a smooth finish!
I was happy to see that the dark stain on the fretboard up at the nut end (look at older pics to see that) disappeared under the sanding. Of course, this made me question my placement of the dark stain on the headstock veneer that was intended to kinda match it, but no turning back now 🙂
There’s a shot of the end better showing the radius. Hey, there’s a little gap between the binding and the fretboard on the left side. Sure wish I had some fretboard dust I could fill that with…
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