Neck and Bridge

The Final Parts

There are only two parts left to make: the fingerboard, and the bridge.  Here is a piece of ebony (for the fingerboard) and a piece of Madagascar rosewood (which will yield a few bridges).

Dimensioning a bridge...

While I'm at it, I'll make a bunch of bridges...

I'll revisit the bridges later, now on to the fingerboard.  First the ebony has to be thinned.

Then the fret slots are sawed using a jig.

Before gluing the fingerboard onto the neck, it is tapered to the proper dimension.

Here the fingerboard has been glued on and the frets installed.

Another view of the frets.  If something looks a little odd, I put 'gold' frets on this guitar (as opposed to silver).  Gold (not real gold of course) frets are fairly new and I thought I'd see how they look...

You can see that the neck still hasn't changed much from the board that it started out as, so the next job is to shape that board into a guitar neck.

Next Post: Shaping the Neck, and Back to the Bridge