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Burn, draw, or paint fret lines

I'm making some fretless cbg's but I want to mark the frets. What do most of you use to do that? Seems like drawing them on would be the easiest but I don't know what you would use. (paint pen, sharpie, etc) I do have a woodburner, but haven't had great luck burning into oak, (course i haven't tried straight lines with it, just some swirly design my wife wanted on something). Thanks for any and all help

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Permalink Reply by Larry Chapman on May 19, 2015 at 11:18am

The very first CBG I built was fretless but I scored the lines with a saw and pounded solder into the grooves. Looked great but the neck started to break so I loosened the strings and it's been a wall hanger. So, I can't speak to how well it would have stood up to playing.

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Permalink Reply by Brown Water Jerry (Rice) on June 29, 2015 at 2:52am

On my first build I drew lines with a square and carpenter pencil . After that I did a couple with a nail pliers and a torch, point for lines head for dots on fingerboard . Now I have progressed to a wood burner.

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Permalink Reply by TN Twang on June 29, 2015 at 3:37am

The heated nail idea sounds great for authenticity, but a few bucks for a woodburner from Hobby Lobby is well worth it. It might be worth the effort to heat nails and other metal objects to burn in crude "primitive" decoration.

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Permalink Reply by john mackay on June 29, 2015 at 3:59am

I bought this thin marker pen.

you will need to put a light coat of lacquer on the wood to stop the runs through the grain.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/321783507347?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649...

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Permalink Reply by Peter Otto on June 29, 2015 at 5:49am

I found a great method by accident. For my lapsteels I used a thin sawblade to cut fret slots and then filled those with thin strips of maple (takes hours to sand them down to thickness). For my first CBG, I wanted a less time consuming method, so I used iron-on plastic ribbon that is normally used for finishing the sides of door pannels of kitchen furniture :) I slotted the fretboard like I did with the lapsteels and glued strips of the ribbon into the slots. Easy to plane and sand down and the result is really nice. Hope this helps!

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Permalink Reply by Blues Frog on June 29, 2015 at 11:56am

My first build was a fretless. I used a square to draw the lines across the neck, and then used my wood burning set to burn the fret lines in. I also used it to make the inlay marks.

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Permalink Reply by David Cox on October 31, 2016 at 6:29pm

Hey guys, most of the cigar box guitars I built were fretted (I'm a guitar player...been using frets for many years) but then I saw some of Shane's builds and it turns out that he burns most of his frets in. I recently saw a video of him using an upper end wood burning system from Colwood and it worked really well. I looked into them and found them to be pricey so...after doing some research, I found out how to build a SAFE wood burning unit from a 10 amp battery charger (though I use it on the 2 amp setting and that's more than enough). I have made 2 different burning handles, one for fine detail work, and the other to burn a fret...yes it does the entire fret (line) in about a half second. The total build for the burner and handles was under $60 and it does the job perfectly and you don't have to worry about burning your shop down. If you have any interest in seeing this unit, I will post some pics or even a video. Just let me know. David www.poboyguitars.com

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Permalink Reply by David Cox on October 31, 2016 at 6:31pm

Sorry...posted this twice by mistake so I erased one. I also have made many other jigs and have found a few tricks in all of my builds. If you're having a problem maybe we can discover a solution together. I love building these guitars and I don't mind helping anyone that asks.