Resawing a fretboard

The new workbench hasn’t appeared yet, so I did some cleaning of the old one. Since my last post I have sort of accepted two orders and made plans for another build on top of those. I still think the new bench will solve most of my problems but we’ll seewhen it gets here. 

Today I had an hour to spare so I dug out the bubinga I used for the fretboard on my mate’s tenor guitar last year. He’ll need one on the double neck I’m building. 

I scored a line around the blank but didn’t bother with sawing a kerf. I could’ve done it with the Proxxon table saw or a kerfing plane but wanted to try the wee rip saw I salvaged this summer. 

So I just got going. I flipped the board frequently to keep myself on track. 

The gunk is from the blade, I get less of that every time. The old Swedish proverb is ”a used blade shines” and it’s hard to argue. 

The bubinga has a problematic grain so I whipped out my toothed plane that I got from my mate Chris. He built it himself and it’s just what’s needed in cases like this. 

Here’s an attempt at showing you the blade. The grooves that are left in the surface are easy to get rid of by alternating direction, or with a cabinet scraper. I did both. 

Here’s my Veritas cabinet scraper taking care of the tooth grooves. 

Then it was time for slotting. I prefer not to use double sided tape directly on the wood, tear out and possible glue residue are enemies of Argapa. So I put masking tape on the fretboard blank and the slotting template and put a row of super glue drops on one of the layers. The aim is to get the strips of tape to bond, they’ll hold the board securely but will be easy enough to remove. 

It turned out my super glue has aged. Or something. It didn’t hold but luckily gave after the first slot of the two needed for the nut groove. So out came the double stick tape, but..! I let the masking tape be where it was. 



And that worked. Both masking and double stick tape were easy to remove, and the fretboard is ready for profiling and contouring. And fretting of course. And inlaying. Haven’t given that much thought, but surely I should put something on there?