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Hello everyone

I was wondering if any of you folks have any experience with removing a fretboard on a classical guitar and if you have any tips so I don’t mess it up.

It’s my fathers guitar so it means quite a bit to me. The issue I’m having is that the action is way too high and the saddle has reached its lowest point. When measuring at the 12th fret I’m getting an action of 5.5mm underneath the string to the fretboard. I tried removing some material on the fretboard from the nut end a couple of years ago but action is still sky high.

I’d like to replace the fretboard with a thicker ebony fretboard. When I put the straight edge on top of the fretboard what am I aiming for in terms of where that straight edge should be at the bridge?

Help is always much appreciated!

Best

Carlos

I've seen cases where people have simply planed the fingerboard level, and glued another piece of ebony on the top. With care the joint will simply disappear, and you avoid the risk in trying to un-glue the board without damaging the neck or the top. It's probably best to go below the existing fret slots.

Classical guitars generally use higher 12th fret action than steel strings, so I'd aim at having the straight edge on the fingerboard point a mm or a bit more above the bridge top.

I believe another accepted method of changing the fretboard plane is to hand plane a taper into the fb making it thinner at the nut end. My jam is not repair though so…

I recently took my only classical guitar that I made a long time ago, cut the neck off and converted into a bolt-on. Oh the horror! But neck angle will never again be an issue with this guitar. By the way, no effect to the guitar’s tone or volume.

Update- I’ve installed a new ebony fingerboard. One thing I noticed when I started marking out the fret positions was that the previous slots were cut incorrectly, some were pretty far off. I cut the fret slots in the correct position and noticed the bridge had to be moved to accommodate the new fret slots so I made an oversized bridge and now I’m in the process of regluing the new bridge.

When I pulled off the old bridge a lot of top material came off with the bridge. How would you folks approach this repair?

Best

Carlos

I'm curious how you determined the frets were spaced incorrectly. If you moved the bridge to accommodate new fret slots, it sounds to me as though you may have changed the scale length.

A normal setup for a classical guitar is 4mm for E6 and 3mm for E1, measured from the top of the fret to the bottom of the string. You stated in your OP that you measured from the bottom of the string to the fretboard. Accounting for the ~1mm of fret height, if we're talking about the E6, this would have put you only .5mm high.

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Carlos, hopefully you haven't thrown out the old bridge. You want to gently heat the old bridge and use a fine palate knife to remove the spruce splinters and glue them back where they belong. If you've tossed out the old bridge, things must done carefully. Check to see if there's a bridge plate. You will have to smooth out the bridge footprint on the top with a Dremel or small router and glue in a spruce patch as small as you can, and if there's a bridge plate it gives you more to work with. Hopefully, your patch is smaller than the bridge footprint so it's hidden under the bridge. You don't want to go any deeper than you have to. To glue in the patch, you want to get a high solids/low water glue glue because most glues have cold creep. I use Lee Valley 2002 cabinetmakers glue. Make your patch a little higher than the top an then sand or plane it flush.