Dedicated table saw for fret slots.

[Brian Dyskin]

Thanks to you all, especially Mario for the advice. I received my ebony boards from LMI, and ripped a 10mm strip from each (one 25" and one 25.5" scale length). I glued these strips to either edge of a piece of MDF and then sanded the whole thing flat on the thickness sander. A couple of coats of shellac to seal and hey presto, I have a cheap double sided fret template and 2 slotted ebony fretboards for the price of the boards! (The 25" side has been set up for a zero fret and a 3mm string guide "nut".)


The index "pin" on the fence is a piece of blunt utility blade, sanded until it has a snug fit in the template slots and then the edge was rounded to reduce wear on the template. Fits snugly into a slot in the fence and kept with minimal protrusion as per Mario's advice. It starts about 10mm above the table, so even thick fretboards will fit, and the template is thick enough that it still engages with thinner fretboards.




I slotted a dozen fretboards with it today - what a pleasure!

Thanks again to all who helped with this.
edit - clickable thumbnails don't seem to be working for smaller pictures- let me know if you want to see them big.

[Greg Robinson]

Hi Brian,
I've fixed the tags you used to make your images clickable, however you've only linked to thumbnails, not the full size images.
Here's an example of the correct tags:
[url=www.whereikeepmyphotos.com/1.jpg][img]www.whereikeepmyphotos.com/1.jpg[/img][/url]
Notice you need to wrap the image tags in a url tag.
Hope this helps.