Careful marking out of the saddle location on the bridge. The scale length is measured on to the bridge then the correct treble and bass distances are calculated to take into account the variation of string stretch so that I can get perfect intonation. Even finer intonation adjustments are made on the actual saddle itself later on....plenty of opportunity to get myself in a major maths muddle here.....
Next drilling out the peg holes. Tricky to do a very good job here, a well seated pin allows free movement of the string through the bridge, while trapping the ball end firmly between the peg tip and the bridge plate inside the guitar.
I was a bit naughty and forgot to take pics of me stoning and levelling the frets, oops. Here I'm polishing the frets after re crowning them. I move up through 400, 600, 1000 grit and finally, fine Mirlon pads to get a super slidy shiny rounded fret. I made things a little difficult for myself here, I should've masked off the white stripe on the laburnum fingerboard. I made it pretty dirty in the polishing process which means I'm going to have to do a nifty clean up job on it after. Listening to Springsteen, not paying attention. Damn you, The Boss :)
After the frets have been polished its time to fill the fret ends, where the saw has emerged through the sides of the fingerboard. To do this I melt some dyed shellac with a soldering iron then sand it flush......you can see the shellac stick in this photo.
While the guitar is in this position its a good opportunity to add the side dot markers. Here I'm using 2mm white mother of pearl dots. There's been some careful depth gauging of the hole going on here!
And in this pic I've started work on the truss rod cover. A piece of laburnum, cut to the required shape, taped down to the work bench then shaped with 150 grit sand paper. In this pic here the outline is a little uneven, more work needed.
I'm off to Bestival for 5 days tomorrow, so hopefully I'll be getting things finished by the end of next week. Woo-hoo!
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