Fretting and body work

So I finally got back to work yesterday and accomplished a bunch. The body was mostly complete, except for finishing, but I needed to trim the top and back to fit the sides exactly. In many places this was already done, but yesterday I finished this work. I started by sharpening my block plane’s blade to pretty much lethal sharpness. I then used the plane to remove most of the wood. You can’t really remove the entire overhang with the plane because at some point you’ll start removing material from the sides with the plane, too. After using the plane to do most of the bulk work I used a sanding block, made from a piece of 3/4 “ plywood, wrapped with 80-grit self-adhesive sandpaper to remove the remaining overhang. I sanded the top and back edges until they were flush and there were uniform sanding marks on the sides as well. (As recommended by the instructions I sanded very little at the neck joint to minimize distortion of the shape of the neck-to-body joint, since we want that to be tight.) Having sanded the top and back flush, I wrapped some 150-grit around the sanding block and did some cleanup on the sanding marks.


Here a problem presents itself. I fitted the neck just to check things out and it turns out that the body is a bit too thick – the fretboard rides out onto the body at the end of the neck, but the body is thicker than the neck at this joint and the fretboard will not fit. A couple of pictures will probably make this clearer.














See the “hump” at the neck-to-body joint? The fretboard will not work with that hump. I must admit that I’ve been concerned about this for a few weeks, but today I decided to just fix it. So I marked out the area that the fretboard is expected to cover on the top with a pencil, and made a mark on the edge where the neck meets the side, and went to work with a chisel thinning down the top in this area. Here you can see this work underway:


I have to assume that if I had done more sanding during the step below where I put the curvature into the top I would not have had this problem. As it is I hope that the neck angle works out (I think it will) and that thinning the top slightly in this area won’t make the top unstable (I think it won’t). Hopefully I can disguise this in the finishing, too, but that remains to be seen.

I still had some time (and energy, and guts) left after that bit of work, so I decided to tackle the start of what might be the hardest part of the project - fretting the fingerboard. The instructions tell you to do this before gluing them together, and though at first I wondered about this, I get it now. The hammering is much easier to do when you can lay the fingerboard flat on the bench rather than having to support the neck's contours sufficiently. The supplier helpfully left some extra fretslots in the cutoff piece of fingerboard for practice. I already did one months back, but as a refresher I did another. Here is a photo of the new one (I'm pointing to it):

By the way, I'd recommend buying the fretting kit from Stew-Mac - I used a cobbled together set of tools and find myself needing to order from them anyway to finish. Here are my tools, and a piece of the fretwire as delivered:

I bought the hammer from Harbor Freight and the dikes are my wife's from her stained glass kit (sorry, Babe, I'll give them back!).

Turns out that seating the frets is relatively straightforward and it only took me about half an hour. Here are the results, and a detail of a few of them (I know, I really didn't drill the fretboard dots very well!):

And here is a summary of everything today: