Time to refret my acoustic - and pimp the inlays too!

[felineguitars]

I have an old Alvarez acoustic guitar - not an overly expensive one , but it sounds ok and is fun to mess about with.

I was stuck at home this weekend with a nasty cold and eventually got bored watching TV so I decided to pop the acoustic on the bench for an overdue refret - I'm going a bit bigger with the wire so it will be easier to play .
Also adding an Earvana shelf nut - handy that the nut is just 43mm wide like a Les Paul.

While we have the frets out we also set about changing the inlays - the existing ones were just small dots, and the choice of maltese crosses seemed like fun.

Here you can see that I have already pulled the frets out and laid out the inlays on the bare board to see how the layout will look

I've temporarily stuck the mother of pearl pieces down with the equivalent of model airplane glue - enough to hold them in place for me to scribe around to mark out where to cut with the router so I can set them into the board

 

[felineguitars]

Okay - made some more progress , although I'll leave it for today:

Inlays installed and frets installed.
I chose to stain the fingerboard with an ebony stain to even up the colour

I'm looking forward to having the next stages done , so I can play her

 

[BigBrewtus]

I like the look. Always enjoyed every Alvarez guitar Ive ever had.

 

[rhequiem]

That's awesome! Love those inlays. I think inlays are such a cool way to make a guitar pop. Is doing inlay work tough? It seems so mysterious to me. I imagine setting to the fretboard with a dremel tool for painstaking hours of fine detail labor. Seems like you got it knocked out really quickly and cleanly!

 

[felineguitars]

It did take hours to do , and to be fair I had all the bit's prepped ahead of time - so it flowed comparatively quickly, and I'm pretty experienced in doing this stuff which helps.