A bit more micro-progress eked out over the holiday weekend...
Here's the bass as it stands now
I had a lot of tearout on the edges where the grain turns, had to fill with "high performance wood filler" (bondo) and then template sand with the Robosander. Interesting and aggravating note on this, the guide wheel on the Robosander is set to a diameter that works ONLY with 50 grit sanding sleeves, though it says that nowhere in the documentation. I bought a set of 150 grit sleeves from Kingspor advertised as for the Robosander. Guess what, they don't work! The 150 grit sleeves are enough thinner than 50 grit that they never contact the work! No mention of this on the Klingspor site either, of course. I sent a note to the guy who invented it, he very generously offered to send me an undersized guide wheel that will work, kind of dead in the water on the body till then.
I've never made a fingerboard before, so decided to make a full mockup to test techniques, particularly full-width inlays. here's a photo of the bubinga blank, a mahogany mockup made from some deck board I had kicking around, and the MDF template:
Here's a ghetto scrapwood prototype of a binding jig I put together as an experiment. I used KD funiture connectors to give it micrometer adjustment. Turning the bolt at the back runs the pointy stylus end in or out to un-mask more or less of the bit, in this case a downcut spiral.
Results were mixed, depending on grain. One attempt very smooth with grain climbing into cut, one not so much with grain falling away. All the Stewmac binding sets and similar seem to use a shear-cut rabbeting bit, so maybe that's my problem, wrong bit for the job. Or i just suck at jigs!
I got some 1/8" thick faux MOP from Constantines and cut it roughly to size on the bandsaw, then sanded edges straight for the full-width inlays. These still have paper templates glued to them, with the uncovered material at the top of the photo. I am under the assumption that the faux MOP swirly-ness extends through the depth of the material, looks that way, but I'll radius sand a scrap to see how it looks!
Next step will be practice inlaying the full-width inlays on the scrap mahogany fingerboard mockup. I don't know how much harder or softer the Bubinga is, they feel about the same by fingernail test, but one or the other may be more prone to tearout or splintering. I plan to proceed as follows for the actual Bubinga FB:
1. Leaving FB blank slightly oversize, cut full width "wedge" shapes for inlays across entire width of blank. Experiments will tell me if this is cleaner by chiseling the line or just running a downcut spiral right across to form inlay edges (probably chisel will be cleaner).
2. Glue inlays into place. I figure this will prevent tearout of corners of inlay recesses in step 3.
3. Use MDF fingerboard template to pattern rout fingerboard to size. The question is, will this melt the faux MOP in the process, or cut cleanly. I have no idea!
4. Using my binding jig or rabbeting cutters, rout channel for binding along edges of FB. Same question, will the MOP inlays melt during this?
5. Assuming all goes well with steps 1-4, install binding, scrape flush, then radius sand the board with binding and inlays in place so everything gets ground to radius simultaneously.
6. Install frets before or after glueing FB to neck??
Any advice from those of you actually have experience doing this, by all means chime in! I'm out on a limb, but in no hurry to jump.
