Official Luthiers Forum!

Todd: And I wonder how you know this ..........??
Tom

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A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!

On my first (and, so far, my only ) guitar build, I got all anal about the fret spacing, and used my collection of engineering slip gauges (of which I have hundreds) to measure the slot locations, and used a sharp marking knife to score the center of the slot.

I used the StewMac fret spacing calculator and registered off a stop at the nut end (effectively, off the nut) and just added gauges as necessary. Took forever, but was actually quite enjoyable. I was using an unusual fret scale btw, 25.2".

Kent's tip about setting the saw to one side of the mark is excellent ...I actually centered the cut (or tried to) but it would have made much more sense to do it his way ...particularly as I was doing a poor man's nut compensation anyway by trimming off 1mm at the nut end of the board once all the slots had been cut.

When I first started building back in the 70's cutting fret slots for me was the most daunting task of the whole process. As a journeyman machinist I was use to working to close tolerances and could not accept marking from a scale and cutting the frets. Did not know what kind of accuracy was required and there were no machined fret cutting fixtures. Bill Lewis in Vancouver B.C. was shortly after to come up with a fret cutting jig before he sold out to Todd Taggard who started LMI and now runs Allied Luthiery. Rather then use JO blocks (slip gauges) as murrmac has done I had 3/8" dia. AL rods (20 in Number) that I used from a common data point and moved the board on a sled fixture. A bit of a pain but I felt it was accurate enough to do the job. Made my first dozen or so boards that way and it worked excellent. I stepped back from building guitars for a number of years and when I got back in LMI was precutting slots and have used them ever since. Lots of way to do this but I think the trick is know it's accurate enough. The proof is having a board that plays correctly but that's a long way from the actual cutting.
Tom

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A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!