Build Your Own Guitar - Making the Fretboard - How we do it

that this is how we do it okay when you sell your first guitar you can save up buy the tools and do this first thing we need to do is to mark a centerline so this is a new technique yun seen before this is how i find a center i roughly guess it and i put a nice big round number like ten in the middle then what I do is I look at the edges and you can see this is a seven that sorts of five I'm not really looking at the numbers I'm just looking at the distance this is a really quick way to find a center you can make sure both edges are exactly the same distance away and then Mark the center will do the same this end and then join them up to make a centerline so I'm drawing the center line on the side that I want to be the front I've chosen this side as the front there's a little bit of a defect down here but that will be taken out with the radius now I'm going to fix it to this pattern using double-sided tape we use about four or five pieces what I like to do is to stick it on cut it with a blade and then I'll use the blade to pick up the corners like this but I bill the tape off until I'm ready to go with this dust as your enemy so any dust on there will prevent it from sticking we need it to stick really well so it doesn't move while we're working okay so on I'm now ready to go I'm going to peel the tape off all at once and stick it down on the pattern in line with the center line and about half an inch past the first cut line up the center line at one end and then line up the center line at the other end drop it down so then you know it's lined up at both ends okay bit of clamping pressure to activate the double sided tape and that's ready to go over to the power fret slaughter so this is my power fret slots or it's just a plain old piece of board mounted onto some drawer runners which is mounted onto the cheapest table saw when you can buy the expensive bit was the saw the actual blade it's alpha is a special order it has to cut exactly the right width mounted on the the rail here is a little pin on the fret scale pattern there's a notch cut for every fret so simply insert the notch and run it through the saw what I like to do is just run it through once because if I bring it back through it widens out the slot which is no good so this is ready to go you have to be a little bit careful how you take this off because some because of the threat slots it can be quite fragile so the next thing to do I'm going to stick it onto this neck nectar template this is the neck profile I'd like to show you where this came from came from the drawing if we measure here measure this distance and then measure here we can mark that out onto a piece of board this is the kind of thing you're using if you buy quarter of a sheet of MDF you'll get all your patterns out of that and what we do is because this is them this is as it came it was bought these edges are really nice and straight so if you just pick in the middle somewhere measure out your fretboard measure this distance this distance you can draw on the taper notice this is a lot longer than the neck so I've used the middle section that's a great advantage because if I want to make my neck a little bit narrower or a little bit fatter I can just move it along the neck template okay so I'm going to show you what we do with it there's also a center line drawn on this template although it's quite faint I might just draw it on again so you can see it we've got a center line on the template and I by placing it on the drawing I can see where it matches to mark where the nut is okay so the next thing is to stick the fretboard on in line with the nut there like this and in line with the center line so I'll just do that now we use the same double-sided tape this is actually called exhibition tape was invented for exhibitions where they have to rip up the carpets and it was wrecking the tiles so they invented this tape it's better than ordinary double-sided tape it comes off a lot easier again will peel up the corners and then when I'm ready to go peel them off now I'm going to line it up very carefully this is the nut take-off point level with this line and level the center line so we've got one end down first and then drop the other end down and then we know both both ends are lined up exactly with the center line okay so the idea here is that we're going to trim off this excess we're copy in this shape into the fretboard that is too much for the router to take off so what we do is we first cut on the bandsaw cut it reasonably close and then we'll finish it by profiling with the router so I'll show you that just now to the Bansal so this is the bandsaw basically a metal metal blade goes round in a circle with teeth on it pointing forward the critical thing about a bandsaw for us is the depth of cut because we're going to we're going to need to cut the headstock on here and the neck the neck is the widest thing that needs to be cut it's about four inches so you need a bandsaw with at least four inches depth of cut or the width of your headstock okay we're going to trim this some fretboard down to size whenever we cut in anything out is a two-stage process we cut first with the bandsaw and then we profile with the router so when you're intending to profile with the router we don't have to cut it even very neatly we're just going to leave about one and a half two mil cut all the way down both sides and then we'll finish it with the profiler [Music] so when you are using a bandsaw there's a few couple of things that I always tell people you'll notice when I cut my hands were while away from the blade I see people do this don't play chicken with the bandsaw because you might just slip you don't need to put your hands anywhere in line of the blade my hands are always off to one side like this you don't need to put your hands anywhere near the blade we're all guitar players if anybody loses a finger in here that's the end of it I'll call it quits don't want you to be the one that does it okay this is profiling with the router after it's been cut roughly on the bandsaw then we're going to use a router and one of these special profiler cutters so what happens is if I just don't strike the bearing here we'll follow the pattern and the cutter will copy the shape into the fret board it's really simple this is an especially good cutter there's actually a turnable blade we can so effectively we've got four brand-new cutters now the length of the cutter isn't vitally important any of these would do this is my favorite I'm going to use that one so we'll put it into the router clamp the fretboard and we'll set the depth on the router so that it just cuts nicely through the fretboard but doesn't touch the bench you don't the bearing to be touching the bench so this is this is profiling there's three things I want to tell you about profiling it's one of the most dangerous types of routing because the cutter is actually exposed you could if you're an idiot put your hands in there and cut your fingers off so the three things I need to tell you to protect yourself one we never start the router if the cutters touching the wood because it might take a chunk out what we do is we turn it off on away in a safe area and then we ease in and then we can continue our cut second thing we always go against the direction the cutter spinning the cutter spins this way around you'll soon know if you go the wrong way because it tries to act like a wheel and it tries to accelerate you're not in full control if you go the other way then you're pushing against it all the time it's much easier to control the speed okay so the third thing when you finish your cut you come to the end and you switch off ease out and wait until the cutter stop spinning before you do this or this because the router will walk along the bench and the classic one is everybody does this and it takes a chunk out of your fretboard ok so there's three things to avoid we never start the router if the cutters touch in we go against the direction that cutter spin in and when we've finished we stop and wait until the cut to stop spinning before we do anything there's just one more thing to protect your fretboard and that is when you work in don't tip the router we keep the router nice and straight okay so I'm just going to profile this fretboard right now [Music] so now we've got a fretboard which is exactly the same shape as the pattern be careful how you take it off we're going to now take that over to the radius machine and put the radius on front of the fretboard so this is my fretboard radius machine used to put the curve on the front of the fretboard it's simply a sanding machine with a swinging arm this distance is 12 inches puts a 12 inch radius on the front of the fretboard okay it is adjustable so you could move this up and down get any radius you want we can even put a different radius on this end for compound radius I've set this up just for a straightforward 12 inch radius which is most popular so here we go so regice in the fret board on the machine takes a lot of the hard work out of it which reduces a lot of the mistakes I find if you hunger a radius fretboard if you're just still square that's fine but now we're going to cut the ends off make sure you cut it in the right place this is zero where the nut is so we're going to cut there this is the first fret this is the 22nd fret so the end of the fretboard is here I'm just going to cut the ends off now you need to clamp it and cut with the fret saw this is why we have a protective cover on the bench because you're going to cut into your bench notice I'll use two hands on the saw I never do this because you're likely to widen the slot two hands on the saw like this so that's the fret board finished we'll try it on the draw and see how it looks perfect you

Channel: Guitar Making

Views: 69,633

Keywords: build your own guitar, Making the Fretboard, How to, DIY, fretboard, mak a fretboard, frets, fretslots, Lesson, online course, course, guitar making, guitar, Do It Yourself (Hobby), Hobby (Interest), Fingerboard, make a fretboard, custom guitar, how to make a guitar, how to build a guitar, custom guitar build, electric guitar, diy fretboard, how to build a guitar neck, how to build a guitar from scratch, bailey guitars, mark bailey, tutorial, make fretboard, guitar fretboard

Id: 9hmILlfvaOA

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2015