Fretting about superglue and ramps.......

Sorry my postings have been a bit sparse lately. Work has been very busy, and the weather has been so beautiful that I have been having a tough time staying inside to work on the guitar. Tonight, after dinner I decided I have been neglecting my duties long enough so I went up to the shop and spent a couple of hours working on the neck. I first decided to get the rest of the frets put in. After hammering them in, I noticed a few of the frets that I had already installed were popping up a little on the ends. After trying to hammer them back down, I decided that they weren't in there secure enough for my comfort level so I hit them all with thin CA to set them. After that, I spent the next hour cleaning the glue off of the fingerboard! There must be a better way to do this than just wicking it along the edge of the frets. It ended up getting on the wood between every fret so I had a lot of sanding and cleaning with acetone to get it all off.

After that, I filed the ramps at the bottoms of the slots, and then did some sanding on the peg head. I am not sure if I am happy with the ramps or not. My plan was to have round ramps on the front, like normal, but keep the back half of the slots square so when you look at the back of the peg head, the slots look squared off. I did that, but I am not sure if I like it or not. I am debating on two options. First, round off the rest of the slot and be done with it. The second is a bit more ambitious, and different. I am thinking about actually squaring up the ramps so they are rectangular shaped instead of round. In my mind, I think that it would be pretty cool looking but I am a little afraid to do it because once I commit to doing it, there is no turning back. I will think about it some more before I make my final decision.

Oh, and I got that magic e-mail tonight from Fed-Ex telling me I have a package on it's way to my house from LMI. Woo hoo! I can hardly wait!

For those wondering how I hammer the last frets in, this is how I support the fingerboard extension. I have a hole drilled in the edge of my table that the truss rod fits in.

Push the truss rod in and like magic, the extension has support and the neck is held in place.

Here is the peg head with the ramps cut. Also, I slid in the tuners to get a feel for how the finished head will look. The whole thing is wiped with naphtha.