Official Luthiers Forum!

Working on a 4-string tenor guitar... I am finally getting back around to finishing it up - it was part of MIMF's $100 Acoustic challenge last year. It's completely made of pallet wood except for the fretboard... which is literally the cheapest slotted fretboard that LMI sells.... It's some sort of dark, chippy wood......

Got my Peruvian walnut/maple binding glued on - and it's glued on wrong.. Somehow, the binding rode up a bit..... so I gotta pull it back off of one side.... The binding breaks in 4-places when un-sticking it.... Glue it back together.... 2 extra days...

Now, once the glue is all good and dried, I plane off the extra and start looking in the fret slots - which are like 25% filled with hardened Titebond.... So I start chipping it out - which has never been a problem before.. but it takes forever.... 2 extra days....

And while I am chipping it out, the fret slots start chipping out REAL bad! Remember the part about the cheapest board LMI sells... Apparently, there was more runout and swirl in it than usual.....

So.. I saved all the sanding dust from radiusing the board - and now I am filling in chips around the slots one at a time with CA and sawdust.... I can do like 2 in a day... so add another 8 days.... Then, gotta re-radius the whole thing again.... Another day

So I have like 16 days involved in a fretboard that would normally to make the same progress that would usually take me about 10-minutes.... but I saved like $7.00 on that fretboard a year ago....

Thanks