Had a spare afternoon so turned my attention to James’s old Rapier.  I’ve got some ideas as to what to do with the body, but more of that later.  Since the neck has no truss-rod the options were to either completely remove the fingerboard and install one or, the easier quicker, and from James’s point of view, the cheaper option of leveling and re-fretting the existing board.  We decided that since it played quite well before, without a truss-rod, it didn’t really need one.  Option B it is then….

First stage pull the old frets and level the fingerboard.

Its seen some service so it took quite a bit of work but got there in the end.  The main aim was to achieve a level fingerboard as it had a slight set to it.  Having got it level some of the fret slots needed re-cutting as they were now a little shallow.

The steel rule taped to the blade stops it cutting deeper than the required 2.5mm for the fret tang.

Once that was done some nice fine sandpaper to get a good smooth finish.

Clean off the dust and add a little lemon oil to bring some life back to the wood.

Once that’s had a bit of a time to soak in, give it a good polish up and start cutting the new frets.

I managed to get about half way up the neck before running out of time.  Still, what I did manage came out quite nicely.  Under all that dirt is actually a rather nice piece of wood.

Keep watching to see how it comes out.  Click here to see the next update.