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I have been applying a finish to a maple neck and fretboard.
A half dozen applications of tru-oil to the neck and the fretboard and it a joy to play.
And it got me thinking - why don't we apply tru-oil to rosewood fretboards?
Can anyone enlighten me on that?
The short answer is that there isn't really a reason to. They are fine oiled and people just generally expect rosewood to be unsealed AFAIK.
You can absolutely seal it if you want to. I'm pretty sure Rickenbacker do?
I read that maple is softer than rosewood, and it's also quite porous and loves to collect dirt. That's why it's common practice to seal it. Rosewood is hard and more oily with finer pores, that's why it's usually left unsealed. However, with the cheap kits, I'm not sure that the maple fretboards are always real maple, as well as many cheap rosewood fretboards are probably "engineered" (artificial) rosewood, made from whatever wood bits.
Actually, was very hesitant towards sealed maple fretboards, but after using tru oil for it, I am very impressed with it and love how it feels. Q
Having expended some elbow grease with the radius block...
Maple takes about 3 times as long to achieve the same result as rosewood.
cheers, Mark.
Hundreds of years of acoustic instruments with rosewood and ebony boards has shown they don't need to be coated with anything. They are dark, so hide any dirt. Maple being a light-coloured wood will show the dirt, so they were covered in lacquer. I believe that Fender were the first people to use maple fretboards, primarily to lower costs (maple certainly cost a lot less than the Brazilian rosewood generally used at the time). The maple still marked fairly easily and didn't look great on B&W TV, so Fender were under a lot of pressure from users to switch to rosewood, which they did after a few years.
So there's nothing to stop you lacquering over a rosewood board, but there's no other reason to do it apart from personal taste. With the need to grain fill rosewood in order to get a smooth playing surface if it's lacquered, and the extra time taken to polish the board lacquer adds a lot of extra cost to a production guitar, which is probably the main reason why so few companies do it. Even 30 minutes extra work (especially at Western labour prices) can put a lot of money on the retail price once all the mark-ups are put on.