Sunday, 2 June 2013

Telecaster Two - 7 - Trying Not To Fret

Well I think the neck radius is about 9.5" and I quite like the idea of a round fingerboard so I decided to start cutting the fret slots.  I mounted my mitre box  in the machine vice and then put a spacer under the neck and an angled shim at the side of the neck and clamped it all in position.  I had carefully marked out the positions of all the frets last night so it was just a case of lining everything up, tightening up the clamps and carefully sawing the fret slot.


Once I had cut out all the slots I sorted all of the frets (I bought a set pre-cut from the Internet) and put them in their own custom holder... A strip of wood with 22 numbered holes I knocked up in about 5 minutes!


I also marked an cut out the nut slot and removed the excess wood with a sharp chisel.  I offered the first fret up to the fingerboard and straight away I realised that the 9.5" radius was just too extreme for these  pre-cut frets so I'm going to have to flatten the radius to the 14" I originally planned.

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