Fretwork and fingerboard glue-up

I trimmed the frets to length and spent sometime filing them to length. Following the instructions I also put a slight angle on the ends of the frets (the instructions suggested about 60 degrees, and I agree with that in concept based upon my playing experience, so I tried to make the angle about that). I'm glad that I bought the Stew-Mac fretting essentials kit because it came with several useful and rare files and then fret nippers, which really do a great job of cutting the frets flush. The book that came with it didn't help me much, though, as it seems primarily oriented to re-fretting work. Here are some photos of trimming the frets and the results of the filing.




















After doing that, which took only about half an hour somehow, I decided to glue the fretboard on. I did this with Titebond and the rubber band strip supplied with the kit. It turned out to be easy, too.












Next step is sanding the neck and installing the tuning machines.

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:

Neck bolt hole

I went out to the shop today to accomplish several non-mandolin related items while my wife and son were napping. While out there I took a moment to drill the neck bolt hole. The instructions recommend just turning the bit with your hands using the predrilled neck block as a guide since a drill is unlikely to fit into the glued-up mandolin sides. I happen to have a right-angle drill, so I could have used a power drill for this purpose. However, upon reflection I decided that the bolt hole was being drilled through the very thin sides and drilling by hand might do somewhat less damage to the sides than drilling with a power drill would. I resolved, then, to twist the bit in by hand. First, of course, I had to go to the hardware store to buy the bit (it's a 9/32" bit and such a size is not a part of any set of bits I currently own). I twisted it in by hand, which turned out to be easier than I expected, but of course it bound when it reached the outside of the wood. I then turned it once with a pair of pliers to complete the hole. To ensure that the hole was clean I then retwisted the bit in by hand from the outside.

To add ridiculousness to the situation I did not have my digital camera at hand, and so the photo of the completed hole was taken with a cell phone.

Good news

I've been down for several days because the weather turned colder recently and as a bonus my kerosene heater took a hiatus. I ordered new wicks for it, which I received and installed today (what a pain in the neck!) so I hope to be working again tomorrow. While I was out there working on the wick I went and looked at the blocks and sides I glued up a few days ago today in order to satisfy myself regarding the issue with the sides being wider than the blocks are thick. To be honest I was worried that I had a major mess up on my hands because I failed to notice the problem until after the neck block was glued in. When I noticed I was at least smart enough to keep both blocks level with the same edge of the sides. However, the bolt hole for the neck (which is a bolt-on neck) is eccentric relative to the thickness of the neck block (it's closer to the back side of the block) and I didn't know whether I had set both blocks level with the top or back edge of the sides.

As it turns out I set them level to the top edge.

This is unbeliveably good for several reasons. First it means that the neck will fit as it sits right now. I was worried that I would have to do alot of adjusting to make this fit work out. Second, the back really isn't under any tension when the mandolin is strung up. However, the front bears the loads from the strings. I therefore want the front to be completely glued to the blocks if necessary. I can live with the back being slightly imperfectly glued (if absolutely necessary) since it serves mainly acoustic purposes, with the added benefit of adding stiffness to the instrument.

This is great news since it means that while I will have to make some adjustments to the instrument to make the back glue on properly it will not affect the construction of the front of the mandolin.

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

My first glue-up

Well, it being the day before Thanksgiving I got out of the office a bit early. I headed out to the shop to actually start the project.

The kit is organized into neat little steps for the do-it-yourselfer. I guess a professional might do things a bit different, with their experience (and with their larger collection of tools), but these bite-sized steps are great for me. Today I glued the neck block to the sides, which is the first step in the plans. Helpfully the manufacturer provided a caul for gluing the pieces together, making clamping the glue-up easier. In the photo to the left you see the dry pieces as they are delivered in the kit. The sides are taped together to the right in this photo, and the neck block is the smaller piece in the center. The block in the center that has a curve matching the negative space of the neck block is the caul provided with the kit. Gluing was fairly simple - first you tape the sides together end-to-end so that they tightly fit at the top of the neck block; then you mark the centerline of the neck block (because you want the sides to join at the centerline); and then you glue everything together. I used some blue masking tape to tape the sides end-to-end and then did a dry-run to make sure everything was going to fit at the time because you really don't want to be trying to adjust clamps to span the item while the glue is wet.

Here you can see the sides taped together with the neck block and caul. You can also see some waxed paper I used to keep the entire assembly from getting glued to my work table.


After preparing all the pieces and getting my glue-up tray and a cup of water to hand I was ready to start. I spread glue on the neck block using a plumber's flux brush (recommended by the instructions, but also how I normally spread glue in my shop when working on other things). After spreading the glue as evenly as possible I carefully aligned the seam in the sides (where they are taped together) with the neck block centerline and pressed the entire assembly into the caul. While doing this I noticed that the block is slightly narrower than the sides. Since the instructions recommend working on a flat surface to keep everything level and flat and do not tell me how to arrange the block relative to the sides I just kept one side of the block and one edge of the sides flush to my table, which is made of MDF and is actually very flat. I'm not sure how this is going to work out for me but that's what I did. Hopefully it won't end up being a terrible mistake. Anyway, I then applied three clamps to the block/caul system to allow the glue to set, making sure that the block remained aligned with the seam and that the edge of the sides/edge of the block remained aligned as noted above. After some consideration of the clamping force I added two clamps to the glue-up from the other side to try to get more even pressure. The resulting glue-up is shown in the last photo to the right. I used a piece of waxed paper between the caul and the sides to ensure that the caul would not become a permanent part of the mandolin, too.