New fretboard

Well sometimes things go south no matter how careful you are. The ebony fretboard for the soprano reso was first in line to get the frets pressed in, and it couldn’t take it. Maybe the slots were too narrow, the saw might need some extra set. Or maybe the wood was brittle and short grained. Hard to tell when it’s black. 

First pic shows the underside, with bends at the two fret slots I started with. 

So I thought about ways to remedy this but decided that a new fretboard was the only way out, forward or wherever, but south. 

I chose lilac, the hardest wood species in Swedish nature. My friend Ludvig gifted me a trunk of unusual diameter, and I have used it for a number of fretboards.  First I planed it with my* Stanley no.6.

Then I scraped it with a cabinet scraper that was actually sharp and in good shape. 

Then I made one edge straight, also with the no.6, and slotted it on the wee Proxxon table saw. I marked out the width at the nut and 12th and made the taper. You see my no.5 in the background, I used that to hog off most of the material and finished with the number 6. 

For the inlay I came up with another symbol for twins, and routed it out with my Proxxon drill/router. 

And I had a lot of ebony leftover... so I made sticks to go into the channel. 

And shaped them. That was a bit fiddly. In the pic I’ve started glueing them in. 

And the end result, I think it turned out better than the the first one. The dots on 3, 5 and 7 are 2 mm pencil leads. I covered the dots with dabs of superglue, hopefully that will keep it from rubbing off on the fingers. 

*My father might disagree so don’t discuss the no.6 with him.