This guitar is getting a custom inlay at (and around) the 12th fret. The inlay is an image of a solar eclipse that’s going to be filled with gold colored resin.
Designing the Inlay
The design part wasn’t too difficult for this. I selected a still from a video of a solar eclipse and I traced that shot using a circle and pen tool on Illustrator. I made some adjustments and took a look at it filled with gold.
Probably the hardest part was figuring out how to line it up on the fretboard. It ended up being placed with the center point of the circle between the 11th and 12th fret.
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Routing for the Inlay
To make the route, I followed a similar approach to what I did for the custom inlay on the analecta guitar and bass builds.
I used the same circle jig that I made last time, except I had to move the center point slightly inward for a smaller circle.
I marked the center point of the circle on the fretboard and drilled a small hole in that spot.
I then took the drill bit out and put it in that hole (upside down), slid the circle jig over it, and started routing.
To better explain, in the picture below, the drill bit is inserted into the fretboard and holds that point of the wood that’s attached to the Dremel base in place as the wood and base spin around that center point.
Whether I’m routing with a Dremel or a full sized router, I always take shallow passes. So, I do a pass, then I turn it off, lower the bit a little, and repeat.
Once I got to full depth on the circle, I removed the circle jig from the base and raised the bit back up.
I free-hand routed the rest of the inlay, very very carefully. Of course I did a test route on a piece of scrap wood before I started on the real thing.
If you’re interested in doing this type of inlay yourself, here are the bits that I use: a 3/64″ router bit for the outline and tighter corners and a 3/32″ bit to clear out the bulk.
After I was done with the Dremel, I cleaned things up a bit with chisels, especially the points at each end of the sun streak.
I’ll also mention that I covered that section of the fretboard with low tack white tape while I was routing. This was simply because it’s very hard to see pencil lines on dark wood.
I was actually hoping that the tape would route nicely along with the wood and I’d be able to use that as a mask while pouring the resin, but it didn’t cut smoothly enough so I pulled it off before doing the chisel part.
Making the Inlay
Like my most recent inlays, this was also made with resin and mica powder.
To not take any chances of it not showing up well on the dark wood (ziricote), I sprayed a coat of white spray paint on the bottom of the inlay route and let it dry. The next day, I sanded the very top of the edges so there wouldn’t be white paint showing from the top.
Since this was on a fretboard that was pre-slotted, I needed to block off the fret slots until the resin dried. I was going to shove veneer strips in there surrounded by painters tape, but it was too tight of a fit.
After watching some resin videos, I ended up finding out that parchment paper was a better idea than painters tape because it releases easily from resin. So, I found some thick paper (doubled up coupons in this case) and pressed them into the fret slots over parchment paper. It looked a little goofy, but it worked for the most part.
Then I mixed the gold mica powder, along with a bit of gold leaf and rose gold leaf into the casting resin. Stirred it all up and poured it in.
I then use a heat gun on low to pop any air bubbles. I have to say, pointing a heat gun at a fretboard is probably not something you want to do for more than a couple seconds. Good news is – nothing bad happened and there are no bubbles in the resin.
After a while I did notice some resin seeping through a couple of the fret slots. It wasn’t leaking out too bad, so I let it go and did a small second coat the next day to make sure the resin was above the top of the fretboard radius. The resin that got in the fret slots the day before prevented any more leaks.
Video recap:
So, after two days of resin pouring and another 24 hours to cure, it was ready to clean up.
The parchment paper and coupons were very easy to remove. The next step was to use a scraper to get rid of all the extra resin that was on top of the wood and built up around the fret dams.
Scraping was followed by sanding with a radius block.
To clean up the fret slots that did get a bit of resin in them, I just used my fret saw to cut back down to the right depth. Then I quickly went over each fret slot with a triangle file to help the frets seat better.
This is something I do on every fretboard, not only when there are inlays. I picked this tip up on one of the luthier forums I’m on.
Binding the Fretboard
After all of that, I marked the fretboard taper and cut it out on the bandsaw. Some block sanding cleaned up the edges, then I was able to add binding to the fretboard.
Once I was sure everything was nice and flat, I used a bunch of brown binding tape and some wood glue to attach the ebony binding to the ziricote fretboard.
The next day I used my carbide scraper to scrape the binding down to the surface on both sides of the fretboard.
Block sanding leveled out the bottom and radius sanding cleaned up the top.
And here it is. I did do a little bit of cleanup after the picture in the area where I can still see some of that white spray paint down in the wood pores. I’ll get some better pictures after I do some fine sanding.
In TikTok form:
All that was left was to measure where to cut off the extra wood on each end of the fretboard, cut it, clean it up, and it’s ready for gluing onto the neck.
More on that later. Stay tuned.
Next post: Putting together the fretboard and neck
