The Deluxester Prototype - Sonic's foray into repeatable scratch builds

[Sonic Mountain]

Slowly Slowly John...

Apparently I have 2 neck blanks at my requested size on their way from Guitar Timbers Australia in Malaney. They've been helpful but a bit sporadic in replying to emails.

I also scored a fine kerfing saw to attempt hand cutting my fretboard with. But of an experiment on some tassie oak going on at the moment. Printed out fret postions and glued that down to the wood stock. The stock is 12mm thick so there will be some material needing removal during the radiusing.. will see how that goes...

Getting it 90 degrees to the edge with the square works fine, but getting the slot heading directly down is trouble some. I went looking at mitre boxes yesterday, but they didn't fill me with confidence given how fine the saw blade is. I think I'll go an grab on and try and ad some thickness to the saw with aluminium flat - also should work as a depth stop.

[Woltz]

When I cut my fret slots I used a piece of timber (that I knew was square) clamped to the fretboard right against the fret line on my paper that was glued to the fretboard as a guide to keep the saw perfectly upright. I eyeballed the depth because the depth I needed turned out to be the length of the teeth on the saw.

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[FrankenWashie]

Slowly Slowly John...

Apparently I have 2 neck blanks at my requested size on their way from Guitar Timbers Australia in Malaney. They've been helpful but a bit sporadic in replying to emails.

I also scored a fine kerfing saw to attempt hand cutting my fretboard with. But of an experiment on some tassie oak going on at the moment. Printed out fret postions and glued that down to the wood stock. The stock is 12mm thick so there will be some material needing removal during the radiusing.. will see how that goes...

Getting it 90 degrees to the edge with the square works fine, but getting the slot heading directly down is trouble some. I went looking at mitre boxes yesterday, but they didn't fill me with confidence given how fine the saw blade is. I think I'll go an grab on and try and ad some thickness to the saw with aluminium flat - also should work as a depth stop.

My 2c worth, if you are going to be doing this repeatedly, order in a fretsaw from Stewmac or another luthiers supplies place. The stewmac one comes with an adjustable depth stop guide and i have found it easy to control and set up.
I buit my own manual slotting jig, that clamps the board where you want it and allows you to set a reference square against the saw blade for squareness across the board, and vertically.
I have also used Wheeler guitars in Botany to slot boards for me, as they can do it from templates on a table saw set up specifically for slotting boards.

[Sonic Mountain]

Yeah I came as close as having the stewmac jig in my cart.... I just have a bunch of different things I need to spend limited $ on. For the cost of the Stewmac jig I could easily complete my fret saw rig, which would be a shit tonne faster.

In the end I decide for this one that I'd channel Robin and just be super patient and use hand tools.

My overall approach to this has been removing human error as much as possible with jigs and templates, but for this particular aspect I'm going to persevere with doing it the hard way.

I think If I add some thickness to the blade so it sits in a commercial mitre box I'll get away with it.

For someone who immediately goes to computer controlled production and .000mm accuracy its hard to accept that great guitars have been build for decades without using that equipment, so I should be able to pull it off

Next cash injection I will definitely look at either completing my jig or buying the stewmac one.

[FrankenWashie]

I couldn’t justify the full jig, my one works well enough for what I do. The fretsaw though was a good investment.

[Sonic Mountain]

Well this is the current rig. Seems to work OK I just have to go slow and let the saw do the work. At least the cuts are going down nice and straight now. You can see the one towards the right is wonky, but that's OK as it's 23rd and I'm only going to do a 22 fret neck on this one. Had to improvise one side of the mitre box as my saw isn't long enough, may as well have built the whole thing from scratch.....

[FrankenWashie]

This is my set up. It is (as are all things in the Lab) a work in progress.




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[Sonic Mountain]

Hah, nice.
I think I'm going to make my own version of that with aluminium square bar. I had a boo- boo with my depth stop and messed up the above board. Super busy weekend so it's just sitting there idle at the moment.

[FrankenWashie]

Hah, nice.
I think I'm going to make my own version of that with aluminium square bar. I had a boo- boo with my depth stop and messed up the above board. Super busy weekend so it's just sitting there idle at the moment.

Unlucky, is the board completely unrecoverable?

[Sonic Mountain]

Mmm.. probably not totally unrecoverable, just one slot is a bit deep on one side. I guess I could sawdust and super glue it. But it will bother me. I'll just use it to test the next evolution of my rig, I have a heap of that tassie oak and it wasn't dear. Which is exactly why I started with it instead of something pricey and super nice.

If the rest of the slots cut Ok I might try and rescue it, if not, it's paid for itself in learning and I can use it as a radius sanding tester as well.