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Hi. i'm working on a maple board and would like to use rosewood for the position markers. What I'm worried about is when sanding the markers down to match the fretboard radius, having the rosewood ground into the sanding scratches on the maple. Anyone done this with good results? Any advice?

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Mike

The only thing nescessary for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.

My experience... if the maple is curly, you'll probably never get all the dust out. If it's straight grained, you'll probably be fine.

Test on scraps.

My only experience with rosewood dust and maple is a rosewood body with flame maple bindings/tail wedge etc. build and seems to confirm what Dennis said. Once I sanded to a find grit, the only issue with dust was in the run-out portions of the binding (i.e., the darker, end grain portion of the flame in the maple). Other spots did not gather color from the dust. Unfigured Maple has very fine pores that don't seem to take in the sanding dust. I really didn't mind the sanding stain as it seemed to add some depth to the flame. I'm sure someone out there can give a better response, but that's all I can offer. Good luck. I'm sure it will turn out well.

Aaron

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Aaron Craig

Same story here with EIR and ightly flamed maple bindings

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

File or sand down to 'close', but preferably not to flush, and then use a razor blade to scrape the final surface. If you get dust on the surface, you can use the razor to scrape it off.

Don't wipe off dust, blow it off with compressed air. Ground in (smeared) dust is another thing, but if you keep it all 'dry' then there's pretty much nothing that won't come out of pores with 90 (or preferably 150) psi.

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Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

+1 - exactly what I was going to say, and you could use a very sharp scraper instead of sanding as well.