Inlay done!

I have to say I'm proud of how this turned out. After two tests in different wood to get a feel of the technique I finished the inlay in the ebony fretboard for the CMS guitar. Here are the last steps:

I sanded down the two lines, time to start on the hardest part - the little "electromagnetic shower" at the 12th fret.

I had to freehand this with no templates, I just drew the lines in pencil and kept going over them with deeper and deeper passes, trying to repeat the same path each time, so that the channel didn't get wider than the router bit (which was already a bit too wide for the veneer strips). Here's what I got after 5 or so passes:

Since the lines are intersecting, the best way to do it I came up with was to glue the veneer in two steps. First, four maple strips:

Then, after sanding these down the following day, the padauk. As the lines curve a lot more here I though I'd try pre-bending the veneer to avoid it breaking on me. I tried my soldering station, set the temperature at the lowest I could get (200C) and tried to bend the strips after wetting them. It took 2-3 tries to get what I wanted, but the result was surprisingly good - I nearly perfectly reproduced the curves:

So after another day of waiting for the epoxy to harden, here's the end result after initial sanding.

Not bad for a first time, I'd say. :)

Time to get busy

I'm moving on to cutting some of the real wood. Here's the channel I routed for one of the long inlay lines in the ebony fretboard.

I had to fight with the Stewmac Dremel routing attachment to keep it from moving my router bit around, which was causing the channel to be a little wider than planned. In fact in one place I managed to route two channels side-by-side, which is really bad but I will have to cover it up somehow - either add a short parallel inlay line or just fill it with black epoxy. Will see.

This time I took pieces of veneer spanning the whole length of the inlay channel:

Here's the first line after cutting off the excess and rough-sanding it down a little. Looks like I have a few gaps that I'll need to fill, should have used more epoxy it seems. But first I'll do the rest of the design.

Inlay tests - done!

Ok. This pretty much resembles what I wanted to achieve. Time to start on the real piece of wood now.

Inlay test: seems ok this time

With the epoxy dry I can now cut off the veneer that's sticking out:

Revealing the inlay looking pretty good for my taste: 

 

Looks like I might be able to pull it off this way. Especially since the real fingerboard will be ebony, its a lot easier to mask any imperfections with epoxy in ebony as its nearly black..

But before I move on to the real thing I want to do a test run for the whole design. I made another template for the other muon track and routed out another channel. Filling it with epoxy mixed with wood dust again:

And another series of veneer strips is in place:

Once this is done I'll have to tackle the hard part again: the little shower of tracks at 12th fret that I will probably have to freehand again one way or another. We'll see.

Inlay test: Take Two

I'm fighting with the inlay again. Time to try something planned-out more thoroughly. I've made a guide for the Dremel attachment to follow exactly the lines that I want to have on the fretboard:

With this I can rout a much nicer channel for the inlay.

The dust from the routing gets mixed with epoxy to have something roughly the same color filling any gaps

And I can now glue two lines of wood strips in - maple and padauk. Leaving this overnight to make sure the epoxy sets in and then we'll see what came out.

Fail series

Here's the results of some of my test runs. Not exactly successful, but I'll keep trying. Here's the inlay:

I tried freehand routing with a Dremel but the router bits don't really match the width of the veneer strips I'm gluing in - I have 0.8mm and 1.6mm bits and the veneer is 0.6mm. So whatever I do I get some gaps, plus the fact that I'm doing it by hand (with a 90 degree wobbly plastic dremel attachement) means that the edges are not perfect - the bit tends to wander a little. When I move to doing this in the ebony fretboard for the real guitar this will be partially easier, as I can fill the gaps with black epoxy or whatnot, but anyway I want to try to make them smaller. I have one idea for that. Stay tuned.

And now the second part - the knobs:

It turns out that "friendly plastic" is not the perfect tool for epoxy casting. Or maybe it is and I'm just using it wrong. Anyway, the idea of making an epoxy resin knob doesn't seem to work - its hard to get the shape right and the plastic sticks to the resin afterwards and its hard to tell which is which. So I think I'll try a different approach - I'll get a knob with a pearl cap and try to replace just the cap. Should be doable.

Fretboard inlay layout

A few days ago, sitting in a plane with my laptop, I got a chance to work on designing the fingerboard inlay. This is what I ended up with after about an hour in GIMP:

The lines are representing two muon tracks running out from the interaction point and bending in the detector's magnetic field. A personal touch is an electromagnetic cascade produced by one of the muons at the 12th fret. Dealing with such cascades is one of the things I've been doing for a long time in CMS.

The drawing is a little bit cheated, since cascades like this usually happen to very high energy muons and the ones plotted are low energy. How do I know? Its because of the bending. The higher the energy, the smaller the bending. The really high-energy ones that I work with look basically straight. But straight lines would look boring so I decided to slip in this little scientific inaccuracy, in favor of aesthetics.

Ok, so now that I've explained myself, I need to figure out how to make such inlay.. hmm...