Post 38: Neck stiffener, fingerboard

      Well, I found a third option and used a piece of U-channel aluminum I had as a stiffener for the neck where the cutout for the pickup weakened it. The 2" brass screws I got, because that was all they had, came in handy to bolt the reinforcement on.  I had to cut down the channel at an angle for them to be long enough. In fact, they are long enough to add a 1/8" aluminum back panel to the guitar later.

      I went to Woodcraft yesterday to look for a nice piece of wood to use as a fingerboard, and ran across a  slab of woof I fell in love with.  At 14 board-foot, it was expensive, but I asked and got a nice discount.  I have been toying for a while with the idea to make a wooden electric bass, and this 16" x 8ft slab of Canari Wood is big enough to cut 3 guitars out of:

      It still has some bark on it, and I love the white outer wood and the colorful orange and yellow sshades of the heartwood. 

       I can visualize gluing two pieces together so a white stripe runs through the center of the guitar body and cutting a Stasi-inspired mini bass out of it:

          But that is for another post. In the meantime, I cut and shaped a piece of ebony from Woodcraft for the fingerboard with an 13" radius.  In order to get the proper radius, I used an aluminum template to scrape chalk I had rubbed on off the fingerboard to show high points and so sanded them down progressively. 

       Before I was quite there,  I marked it and slotted it for frets. The last time I did that for the lap steel, I used a miter box because the frets were straight. But the frets are slanted on this one, with a scale varying from 732mm to 768mm. So I just marked each fret end as precisely as I could with a knife mark, scored a deep fret line with a knife, and followed it with a thin fret saw:

          Here is how it looks on the baritone body with the black 7-string headless guitar locking nut and the piezo bridge roughly in place. I will use a thin piece of ebony as a spacer under the bridge instead of the oval piece of aluminum :