My Les Paul neck

[sdantonio]

I have found the most accurate wat to make a fingerboard (at least for me) is the tablesaw and a .024 kerf blade (available from either stewmac or lmii, I forget which, and actually they buy them from a company in Rhode Island).

Stewmac has a fretscale calculator on their site that is free to use.

Look at their stainless steel fret scales for this application, you can make essentially the same thing from aluminum. Lay them out and use the CNC to cut them and then run off all your fingerboards on the table saw.

[luthier]

McGyver,
The frets are laid out using some fairly simple math. It is called the rule of 18. You take the scale length and divide by 17.817 if I recall. 17.817 is some math constant. The resulting number is the distance from the nut to the first fret. Then you subtract that calculated distance from the scale length and repeat with the resulting new number. This continues for the number of frets you want to calculate. There are fret calculators online where you plug in the number and the computer does the math for you.

[guitarattack]

Could you provide some info on the endmill you used to route this neck? Brand and flutes/size would be helpful.

Thanks for the help,
John

[Jer7440]

Hey John,

I used a few different end mills on this neck. All of the endmills were solid carbide, 4 flute (I had no particular reason for the 4 flute, it was just what I had.). For most of the roughing work I used a 5/8" dia. straight endmill. For routing the headstock shape, I used a 3/8" straight endmill. Finally for the carving of the back of the neck I used a 1/2" Ballnose carbide endmill.

Again, I used these becaused they are what I had around. I have no idea what brand they are. They were just cheapies. In the future I hope to get a 1" dia. ballnose to use for my carving. I will probably just get HSS as carbide cost about 5Xs as much in this size range.

[guitarattack]

Thanks for the quick response...appreciate the help. Good luck on the guitar.

John

[Drakkn]

are you guys making necks with a straight drop in trus rod - if so which truss rod are you using

[luthier]

Stewart McDonald's Hot Rod ( 2 way) is easy to use. I've also used there Gibson style rod with no problems.

[Jer7440]

Stew Mac hot rod here as well.

[Drakkn]

have you got the gcode for the body