Pre Owned ESB4.

[JimC]

FWIW my finish program went like this.

I had the holes drilled/filled/redrilled before applying truoil.

I put on one good coat of truoill sealer filler, about 3 or 4 of truoil and sanded with 400. It readily went back to bare wood in patches, so i rethought and put on several thick coats of sealer filler, sanding just the high spots between coats with 600 until i was confident it was thick enough that i could safely take it flat with 400 wet.

Only then with no visible shiny bits and no bare wood did i go for tru oil. Much the same with tru oil, 3 coats in short space of time, then sand back high spots only with 600. After about 4 repeats i wetsanded flat with 600, 400 for worse bits, then left for about two weeks.

Quick sand with 1000 and 1200, then burnish with abrasive car polish.

Compared to most folks I think more layers sealer thinner, rather fewer tru oil. Most important thing was a movable desk light so i could monitor reflections and easily spot as soon as an area had all wipe marks sanded off.

I trusted truoil /sealer to protect the end grain in the holes while wet sanding, and redrilled after burnishing. Also I used no more water than necessary. Dampened surface then frequently washing dust off the paper and wiping surface with a rag rather than flooding with water.

[JimC]

Hmm. Worried about the stability of the artificial Rosewood fingerboard, which has shown a distressing tendency to lose fibres, I've treating it to a coat of penetrating epoxy primer. I mixed up more than I needed (hardly any) so I gave it three coats. (it has a very long potlife and short drying time so you can get three coats from a single mix). This makes for a coating just thick enough that I've got some brushmarks, which I'll have to polish down, but not enough (this stuff is very thin and low viscosity) that its actually going to hide the various blemishes and missing fibres, which are far more obvious now the fretboard is darker and has a moderate gloss. Sigh.

I suppose the best thing to do would be to remove all the frets - which are now presumably nicely glued in - and coat, sand and recoat until the fretboard is nicely flat with all the missing fibres holes filled flat with epoxy. I really don't think I can face that much work though. Also, seeing as how the frets will indeed be nicely glued in, I wonder how many more blemishes I would manage to add to the fretboard removing the frets.

So I shall see how just polishing off the brushmarks goes, and review. Better wait a week or so for the epoxy to be really throughly cured though I suppose. Next on the list for the epoxy is probably Simon's six string. I think it will be sensible to just give that one coat and review.

[Simon Barden]

Just remember that a normal rosewood fretboard isn't perfectly smooth (like ebony normally is) but does have grain-related indents. The Brazilian rosewood board of my 1965 Gibson Country Western had significant grooves in - certainly deeper than those in your pics.

[JimC]

Interesting isn't it. Given a natural bare wood finish open pores etc are perfectly acceptable and I'd not have the slightest issue. Given a wholly artificial finish like a high gloss lacquer then I think I'd absolutely want to avoid them. This should fall somewhere between - I'm certainly not aiming for the sort of finish that a maple fingerboard would have. I'll look at taking it to a matt style finish with something like 600 grit and decide where to go from there. I'm pretty sure though I should have stopped at one coat and seen how it looked and worked.

[DarkMark]

I have a engineered rosewood fretboard on my ES-5V. I put a few coats of Tru Oil on it and hated the feeling of it. I rubbed it with steel wool (use an alternative if you don’t like steel wool I guess) and it felt and looked much better.

[JimC]

Thanks.
I tried a couple of (whatever the word is for the individual fingerboard divisions between frets!) with 600 grit paper and abrasive polish and I think the results are acceptable.

[JimC]

So I have got a brass 7.25 radius guide and ...

Aha: the factory - at least the ESB-4 factory - must use a tool like that. I'm seeing a faint indentation each side of every fret which is making it tricky to sand the lands for a really even appearance. I wondered if it was inadequate sanding on my part, but that completely explains it.

[Simon Barden]

Not if you look closely at the full-size original pic. The fret press tool is clear of the fretboard so will never leave a mark.

[JimC]

Hush, lets not let the facts get in the way of my nice theory...

[Simon Barden]

It could have been me, but I'm 99.9% sure I haven't done anything to the frets (yet). I know I straightened the neck when I got the bass notched edge but I think that's it. Pretty sure I didn't level the frets as I was going to do that later.

On a proper wooden neck, scraping the wood with a single-edged razor blade is a good way to get the wood smooth and remove marks like that. I've just been doing it on a Les Paul Signature where the fret files made similar marks near the frets and it got rid of them nicely.