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.

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...

Meet the fingerboard

This little piece of ebony will be the fingerboard for the guitar:

I need the fretboard to be ebony because its not going to be a standard fretboard - 2/3 of it will be... fretless. This is not a configuration that I can achieve in a simple way with an already finished (and fretted) neck, plus chances of getting a decent guitar with ebony fretboard for little money are basically zero.
So I decided that I will make a completely new fretboard for this guitar, out of a pre-made blank (with fret slots already made). This means that I will need to remove the fretboard one from the guitar, which is bound to be fun.