Fret Board Radiusing on a Drill Press

[Jim Ebert]

Since I am not able to upload my photos until I reduce their size, (I will do it when I get home) here is a video of the fret board radiusing tool I came up with, but first a brief description. The spindle is made from 4" aluminum that I turned down using the drill press as a lathe. I am sure that a nice piece of hardwood would work as well. I would rather have turned the radius into the spindle on a machine lathe but I don't have one. Even my wood lathe would have been easier but I didn't want to have to dig it out and set it up somewhere. NO room. I did have a friend drill the 1/2" hole through the center of the spindle using the machine lathe in the special effects department here at work. It is important to have that hole as center as possible to start. It makes it easier to turn. Unfortunately there was a job that came up so we were not able to turn the radius with the lathe. I made a radius gauge to measure my progress as I turned the aluminum using my wood turning tools with a makeshift tool rest clamped to the drill press table. Once I was close to the 16" radius, I took to using my radius gauge as a sanding caul by placing the caul against the spindle and sliding some nice heavy duty 80 grit sand paper off a role that I bought for my drum sander. Once the radius was nice I switched to some 150 grit and then to some 220 and 320 to get a nice surface to stick the 100 grit sand paper to. The assembly that holds and guides the fret board consists of 1/4" angled aluminum I think it was 4"x4" if I recall correctly. Since this kind of stuff isn't normally perfectly square which is kinda important I took to my edge sander to true it up. I then drilled two holes that line up with the slots on the drill press table to hold the contraption in place. As guides I used some 1/4" ULWMP (ultra low molecular weight polyethylene) that I had purchased a couple of years ago to have on hand for jig making. It is slippery stuff so everything slides nicely. The piece that the fret board gets double stick taped to is made for 5/8" aluminum flat stock. This piece was already pretty flat so I didn't need to true it up at all. About 2.5 hours to build the assembly that holds the fret board and the track part that mounts to the table. And about 3 hours to turn the spindle. The aluminum pieces were bought at Industrial metals locally for about 25 bucks out of there cutoff bins. Only $2.49/lb.
Note the there is a bushing that the spindle shaft goes into for extra support
So now on to video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEeLhpg ... e=youtu.be
Jim.



.

[Dave Bagwill]

Very clever Jim. I have zero metal working skills but if I did, I would try that.
Or you could sell them. Send me one and I will be the west coast rep! :-)

[Jim Ebert]

The good thing about aluminum is it is almost like wood. Pretty soft and can be cut with most wood working tools. I turned the spindle with wood turning tools.

[Jim Ebert]

Here are the resized photos.

[Jim Ebert]

Couldn't get all the pictures in one post, so here are some more.

[Dave Bagwill]

Jim - very nice! What grit of paper do you use?

[Jim Ebert]

I am using 100 grit paper now but I might experiment with 120 or even 150 in the future. I will do the finish sanding once the fret board is on the neck using a radius block.