MIMF

Got some work done on the fretboard. This one is getting diamond inlays on a 24 fret piece of pau ferro.

Looking really great!

well, photobucket dumped the pictures for some reason....

here they are again

The neck is a bit further along now...

Did you rout the inlay pockets with your CNC?

yeah, it made them about .050" small so I had to open them up with a blade but otherwise it did well. Some reinforcement of my gantry should improve that some. A C-channel on the back of it will get rid of a lot of the flex and some reinforcements of the side plates will help too.

I also radiused and cut the outline of the board with the CNC. Sometime I want to get a few .024" bits and try cutting the slots with it as well.

Got the major parts all glued up. I should have put the side position markers in first though as some of the epoxy I had to glue the fretboard on got into those so they will have to be drilled out again. Some brown and amber dye powder has been ordered from LMII. I do like their powdered dyes and they are very reasonably priced too

going to have to sand back some of the epoxy that leaked out from glue up. I was a bit too generous with it. Guess that is better then not enough!

It has a nice tap tone and feels good and solid everywhere.

A couple of pictures....

Ultra-nice Eric!

MOP side dots in and some extra epoxy scraped away Now some rasp work and a BUNCH of sanding to do.

things move along a bit slowly on this when I'm busy with work! got a few activities going on for the kids too. Just a bit of work with a round file today to clean some machining marks. and pulled the spindle sander out so I can start doing a bit of work with that as well. Hopefully I'll start getting some hardware for it soon.

Did a bit more sanding, drilled the hole for the jack and a hole from the control cavity to the pickups, opened up the pickup pockets a bit, drilled out knob and tuner holes to size... I need to clean up fret ends, drill holes for the bridge, and do a bunch more sanding, plus level frets, finish up the nut then apply dye along with a myriad of other tasks...

Here it is with some of the hardware installed

Pretty sexy Eric!
Looking forward to seeing the finish.
Dan

That is really looking nice EB!

Wow, really great looking guitar.

Thanks

It has a couple of things to patch up, then sand, then apply the dye. I cut the control cavity cover out to match the contour of the guitar last week then thicknessed it a bit and touched up the control cavity to match it. I should probably finish up a project for the wife before I do much more on it though :p

I'll be on to hand sanding next then the first bit of dye. Got the string ferrules installed and need to work on the nut as well.

ready for the first step of dye

sanded to 220 for the bulk of the instrument and to 400 on the end grain areas

Got the first dye in. Going to sand back and apply amber, then decide if I want to do a burst or not

I found out that the dark dye and sanding back can find any imperfections in your sanding work from prior to dye application... I evidently didn't sand enough to get the machining marks out and had to sand pretty deep to get those out so I'll be re-applying the dark dye and sanding back again after I get it cleaned up. More work, but that will make it right.

Next time the finish passes with the CNC will be much more fine. It's a lot easier to let the automated machine do the bulk of the tedious work