Les Paul Inlay

I just finished the inlay work on the Les Paul neck.  Here are photos of the neck and guitar before (with the plastic dot markers) and after the mother of pearl inlay.

The jig (featured in an earlier post) worked really well.  There were a couple of details that will assist anyone trying to do inlay on a fingerboard that has frets mounted on it.

1)  It was hard to hold the Mother of Pearl (MOP) and scribe lines as described earlier.  I changed technique and made small pieces of card stock that filled the space from fret to fret and across the width of the neck.  I then scribed center lines and used double sided tape to hold the MOP in the center.  I cut out the MOP with an X-Acto knife and the held the card stock on the fretboard with double sided tape.  This worked really well as a means of marking the perimeter of the routes.

2)  Holding the MOP in place while the slow dry epoxy set was also a technical issue that needed to be resolved.  Because the frets sit high enough to block attempts to clamp directly on the MOP, I used small 1/4 inch long segments of 1/4 inch doweling as stand-offs for the clamps.  These short dowels were placed near the outer edges of the MOP and did a good job of holding it in place.

Mother of Pearl Inlay

 I decided to redo the fret markers on the Les Paul that I built a little over a year ago.  I purchased a set of mother of pearl (MOP) Les Paul markers from Stewart Mac and I am in the process of installing them.  A Dremel tool router is used with downward cutting bits.  The MOP blank is placed on the curved fret board and a fine knife is used to scribe around the perimeter of the MOP blank.  The blank is then removed and a light coat of talc is applied so that the scribe shows up in white.  The depth of the cut is the thickness of the MOP plus the height of the frets minus a little for dressing the MOP.  I built this Jig for making perfectly straight cuts for the straight top and bottoms of the MOP.  The neck is bolted to the jig and sits perfectly centered and level with the two metal rails.  The shuttle slides down these rails and has a set of lock screws to hold it in place.  The base of the router sits along this shuttle and allows a straight cut.  The rest of the profile is done by hand.  Here are photos of the jig and the first fret inlay.

One down eight to go...

Miniature Stratocaster Pinewood Derby Car

Here is the car that I built for last year's pinewood derby.

It is a miniature Stratocaster Guitar mounted on a chassis that is shaped like a guitar case.  I never raced the car because of fears of destruction as it ran down the track, but it sure looked good!  It is made with a basswood body and maple neck.  A photo of a stratocaster was downloaded from the Internet and scaled to the proper size on the computer before being printed out.  The printed copy was cut up into neck and body sections and pasted onto wood to allow for exact cutouts to be made.  I used grinders, files, sandpaper and other tools to shape the body and neck and then individual fret lines were incised into the finger board with an x-acto knife.  Some 0.25mm wire was glued into each of these fret slots to make actual metal frets and even finer wire was used for the strings of the guitar.  Some scrap sprue from plastic model kits was turned to make the knobs and sheet styrene was used for the finger guard.  Lastly, copper wire and brass tubing were used to make the cable and 1/4 inch jacks to finish out the project.  The body is painted with flaming red lacquer with clear coat over the top.  Here are a couple of other photos of the finished project.