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Can anyone recommend a good instructional book or dvd detailing the process of binding a fingerboard? I assume the actual routing and placement are just like on the body, but do you rout then slot or slot then rout? How do you trim the fretwire to fit (and when)? Can you hammer the frets in or do they have to be pressed? What materials are best to use for that binding? To miter or not? Any other tips?
Thanks! Beth

i believe most people do the binding before slotting and before attaching to the guitar. you can use white or black plastic any kind of wood. probably want to match your binding. or i have used cut off of the fingerboard blank itself. cut off enough to get binding out of then slot then glue on the binding and your bound. then when installing frets you need to nip the ends of the tang off to fit inside the binding. you can press or hammer in frets, most guys don't spring for a fret press. hammers are cheap

Hi Beth,

When binding a fretboard you don't have to route. Here's how I do it.

Get the fretboard to thickness
cut the fret slots
cut the taper of the board minus the width of the binding on each side of the board. If you use a plane you're ready to glue the binding on.
Glue the binding on the edge of the board. I use tape and tape the binding on first, ensuring that the bottom edge of the binding and the board are flush. Then I just use thin CA glue to attach the binding.

I like to use the same material as the fretboard but it will work with what have you. If binding the soundhole edge of the fretboard you can mitre (looks better to me) or I've seen some folks butt join the binding ends.

After the glue is set (10 mins) I pull the tape and scrape the bottom of the board lightly to remove any glue that wicked through. Then I radius the board.

All this before gluing the board to the neck.

No routing involved here.

When installing frets, I use the stew-mac fret nipper to undercut the tang of the fret. I hammer in my frets. I have started to install the frets after finishing is done and the neck is attached to the body. This way I can level the fretboard once more to ensure I've got a dead level surface to start fretting one. This usually requires very little fret leveling.

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I think John Mayes goes through the process in one of his instructional DVDs. He shows it pretty much the way Rod describes it.

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I do mine as per Benedetto's book. But it would work fine with the fretboard off as well. Essentially as Rod described above. If you're putting purfling and binding on, it's slightly different though. Afte the board has been slotted and tapered to the correct width, minus purlfling and binding, glue the purfling on first. Slot the purfling and then glue on the binding. Then use your fret tang nipper, Dremel, file, etc. to cut the tangs just shy of the purfling and install your frets.

Paul I don't think most bind before slots. Not in any shop I have been at anyway. Determine how wide you want for nut width and I use 20th, minus total the width of binding. Glue the binding to the board and then clean slots and put on the neck.

To clean excess glue (hopefully not much) from the slots, a piece of sheet metal heated in a torch and slid in the slot does the job.
John

Thanks so much, everyone! It will be fun to do.

Another ditto for Rod's comments. That is the same procedure I use. You can bind a f/b in no time at all using this approach.

Ken

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If I'm using wood from the same fingerboard for binding, I find it helps to rip off the binding strips before bringing the FB to thickness (but after the board is flat). That way, I have binding that's a bit deeper than the fingerboard when I glue up. I also make sure that the binding is 'overhanging' the bottom of the FB by a bit- it's a lot easier to sand the binding down, than to have to take the FB thickness down to eliminate a gap caused by the binding not lining up with the bottom of the board.
(How do I know this?? )

Cheers
John

i musta been off my rocker because i did mean slot before bind haha. i go on to say that in the next sentence lol

So if the fingerboard has already been slotted and glued to the neck can you still bind it? Just wondering how it would be done in that case

Henderson-
Short answer- it wouldn't be easy at best.
If the neck had been shaped to match the fingerboard width you'd have to rout back the fingerboard edge somehow. This would be so difficult that I think most builders would either:
a) Forget about it and do binding on the next guitar, or.
b) Take the board off the neck and trim to size and bind, then replace.

If the neck hadn't been shaped to match the FB width, AND you were happy with adding a bunch to the FB width, I suppose you could do it.
I just don't see that happening.
Much easier to just cut back the fret tangs and fill the slot ends with 'something that matches the wood'.

Cheers
John

I am doing an eight string fanned fret fingerboard right now. This is the first fingerboard I have every radiused. I am using the 12" radius Steward McDonald sanding block.

Here is a tip I figured out. On an eight string fretboard, it is pretty wide at the bottom, so there ends up being a lot of material to remove. I was wearing myself out, then got the idea to use a scraper. Looking at the wood you can see the areas being sanded and the areas not yet hit by the radius. I took the scraper and carefully took off material at the edges and this sped up the process up a bit.

Also my first time working with ebony. I looked like I walked out of a coal mine when I finished sanding.

Since this will be my first acoustic style neck with a bolt on mortise tennon joint, I am forced to do things in a very different order which makes me a little nervous. I plan to finish the fingerboard before gluing it on which is not how I am comfortable doing it.

Good tip!
Ebony does make a mess when sanding! I have to be careful to keep the dust from light-colored woods, etc..
The scraper idea is a good one. I ground a curve into a scraper for that job once. If you have a very sharp plane and a good fingerboard with straight grain, you can plane it to shape and just finish up with the radius block.
Both scraping and planing keep the dust problem at bay, for a bit.

Cheers
John

I haven't seen it done anywhere outside my shop, but I'm also not using a saw to cut the slots . I like to bind first, then radius, then cut slots. The binding needs to be radiused, so it should be on by that point, and if the slots are cut last then they don't end up full of junk from radiusing.

Just an add-on to what John said: I go over everything that's ebony + something after it's been sanded with a brand new razor blade with the corners 'safetied' to scrape off the epoxy 'shadow'. It doesn't run very deep.

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Bob How do you do that? I can see very precise routing or slotting the binding also? But I know it will look good, just interested in your method. I actually do a little different than most I guess, as I radius before binding.

I use a dremel with a dental burr to clean the slot also before fretting

The slots are milled with a tiny end mill. It takes about twice as long as the saw Taylor uses in their CNC, but it's still just over a minute and the benefits are many.

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