The puns just seem endless when building a guitar. I thought I’d post some information on the challenges I ran into when gluing on the fretboard. I am using hide glue, which is a new one for me. It is water based and has to be reconstituted before you can use it. It also must be heated to get it to a usable consistency. All of this means that if you mess up, you can heat the area up with an iron or steam and the pieces will come apart.
So why am I giving you this information on hide glue? Well, because I relied on those properties when attaching the fretboard.
This seemed like a relatively minor task. First make sure the surfaces were nice and flat. Do a dry run to make sure that it will clamp up nicely. Heat up the glue, spread it out, clamp, and you are done. Or so I thought. My first attempt took about ten minutes from start to finish. But when I checked it the next morning, I had a large gap running on the bass side of the neck. Hmmm. How did that happen?
So out came the old iron and a sharpened putty knife. Fifteen minutes later I had the fretboard off of the neck. When searching for a reason that the fretboard did not lie flush, I discovered that both the neck and the fretboard had almost imperceptible crowns to them. Thus, when they were glued up and clamped, one edge would get levered up off the neck. So a few minutes with the card scraper and I reversed the crown into a very slight concave on both the neck and the back of the fretboard.
Out came the hide glue and clamps once again. The clamp-up went great until I stepped away for a few minutes. When I returned and checked the alignment, I was shocked to see the nut end had slipped a few millimeters off the centerline! This time I was able to just peel the fretboard off before the glue set.
Back at it for the third try. This time everything went well and the fretboard is now a part of the guitar. I also added the side dots. Sometimes it’s the simple things that take the longest.
