LED Guitar #2 - Removing a fretboard with heat

I'm doing this LED guitar for a friend who contacted me through this blog. I'll just call him Ricky (I hope he doesn't mind me using his name). He said he would mail me his guitar if I could remove the fretboard, mill it out and insert the LEDs for him. We agreed on a price and I received the guitar a few weeks ago. Here is what I did on February 18th, 2013.

When removing a fretboard I have some suggestions: if it is an electric guitar, start at the bottom of the fretboard--where the neck bolts onto the body. If it is an acoustic guitar start at the nut end.

My reasoning is that with an acoustic guitar it is easy to damage the wood surface of your guitar where the fretboard is attached to the body. So start at the nut end and work your way down.

For an electric guitar, start at the bottom and work your way up to the nut. The bottom part is mostly covered up by the pickguard, and sometimes an overhanging fretboard.

Get yourself a heat gun, or possibly an iron (if it gets hot enough), then get some razor blades and one or two putty knives or some sort of metal spatula or even a butter knife.

First, heat up the portion of the neck you're working on (in my case, the bottom portion). Next insert some razor blades into the seam where the fretboard meets the neck wood. If the glue is soft enough, the razors just sort of push in without very much resistance. Next heat that portion again with the razor blades still inserted. The razor blades will get VERY HOT. You should be wearing gloves, preferably leather. I found some mechanic-style gloves that were made of leather, and they aren't bulky like garden gloves.
When you've heated it enough, push the razor blades in all the way. There should not be very much resistance if you got the glue hot enough. Don't hammer the razor blades in or use excessive force. Once the razor blades are in almost as much as they will go, use your putty knife and insert it into the gap. You can now remove the razor blades and use the putty knife instead.

Continue to heat the fretboard and putty knife and push it along. Don't force anything. If you push too hard, you might press into the wood, splitting the fibers. If you use enough heat, the glue will go very soft and will not give too much resistance.

When I tried this with an iron it took a very long time. Some people on the internet said to be patient and it can take up to an hour or two. This seemed wrong to me. So I bought a heat gun, and I got the job done in 20 minutes. If it takes you more than 30 minutes, you're not using enough heat.

**(Disclaimer, don't hold the heat gun in any one spot too long, it can easily discolor or burn the wood if you don't keep it moving back and forth).

At this point you can aim the heat gun at the gap under the fretboard as well as heating the fretboard.

There you go. The fretboard came off. This neck was just an old neck that I practiced on. On to the main attraction:

Here I had a problem. The side dots are drilled right in between the fretboard and the neck wood... I had to melt right through the plastic side dots. Oh well. I will fill them in later with replacement plastic, wood, or brass rod.

There you have it: I removed two fretboards, each one only took about 20 minutes. I think one of them was glued with epoxy and the other was glued with wood glue, but both came off with heat.

Stay tuned for more work on this Fender-style Jazz Bass guitar neck.

Close-up look at my guitars

Close-up look and explanation of two of my guitar projects. Sorry if you're sick of seeing the same two guitars over and over again. I have two projects in the works coming very soon, so if you're patient, you might see something new here very soon.

This video is about the 5-string fretless bass:

This video is about the "franken-strat" distressed blue LED guitar:

Blast from the Past - My First Guitar (2006-2009)

This post is completely out of chronological order... Sorry about that. I recently discovered all of these old photos so I decided to make a blog post about them. This project is what got me excited about making guitars in the first place. I started it during my senior year in high school (2006) and finished it three years later after a long hiatus.

It started when I got my hands on an old Stewart-MacDonald catalog, and my dad suggested that I make my own guitar. (He was always looking for ways to get me to do hobby woodworking.) So I bought a book on guitar building: Building Electric Guitars by Martin Koch. I highly recommend that book. 

Shortly thereafter, my dad and I took a trip up to MacBeath Hardwood in Salt Lake City and he bought me a nice block of cocobolo wood to make a fretboard from. It was a beautiful (and expensive) piece of exotic wood, all covered in wax. I still have enough to make a few more fretboards, but I hoard this block of wood because it is so beautiful... and expensive. It will have to be one stellar guitar for me to use the rest of the cocobolo. This is a fond memory of mine, going to the hardwood place with my dad and him selecting a nice specimen for me.

A lot of preparation went into this guitar. I actually drew out a full-scale drawing of the guitar first on some poster paper. I got out some long yard sticks and pens and markers and drew the full scale of the neck, all the frets and EVERYTHING on paper first. It took a while, but it was worth it. I even cut out the paper guitar and held it on my lap to see how it "felt."

This is a 5-string fretless bass guitar. It is a neck-through design, meaning the neck is not bolted on or glued into a slot, but the neck travels all the way to the bottom of the guitar. This makes for a very strong neck. I used a piece of 10/4 hard maple for the neck. 10/4 means that it is 2-1/2" thick. Very thick piece of wood, also very pricey. Luckily for me, my dad hoards wood and had this board stashed away on a shelf. He had no other use for it, so he let me have it.

 Here is the main neck piece with a 1/8" thick lamination layer I added.

I knew I wanted the side pieces to be made of Padauk, 

so I made a thin veneer piece and glued it to the top.

 Truss rod in place.

 I cut the side profile first, but kept the scrap to use later.

              

I taped it together to cut it on the band saw.

 After the top profile was cut using the band saw.

 Roughly cut with a band saw.

 Nothing like some files and rasps to shape a neck.

A hand-held pneumatic orbital sander also comes in handy.

Looks pretty good if you sand out all the bumps.

 Cocobolo wood.

 Splitting wood on the band saw.

 This picture is the most true to the color of the wood in real life. 

 Beautiful grain on this piece of cocobolo.

Sides cut out of Padauk wood. This is 3 years after I started this project.

Notice that in 3 years the Padauk veneer has already aged and darkened more than the sides.

After I glued it together, I sanded down the veneer until the "pumpkin" color came back out.

 Padauk is this gorgeous pumpkin orange color when you first cut it.

It eventually ages to be a deep reddish color. 

It is nice to look at, but it is also very heavy.

You would not want this guitar on your shoulder for a 3-hour gig.

 Amazing what a router bit can do to make it look organic.

 This is after I glued the side pieces onto the main neck slab.

 Pencil and ruler to mark the fret slots. 

I ended up using some strips of Padauk as "frets."

This lets me see where my fingers need to go, but still have that fretless sound.

That's all for this post. There are finished photos of this guitar if you look at my first blog post, and I might add more photos in the future. This is probably the prettiest guitar I have made to date, although I have an even nicer one planned for the future...