Official Luthiers Forum!

I was examining a Vega (presumed, it did not actually have a label) small acoustic, from 1930 plus or minus some years, recently and was surprised to discover it had fret end nibs exactly the same as found on Gibson necks. I haven't closely examined a Vega previously but did manage to find others on the web that appeared to have fret end nibs as well. I was quite surprised. I have a few questions about fret nibs that I think folks on this forum may be able to help answer.
1) did Vega necks always have nibs (obviously only the bound necks)?
2) When did fret nibs show up on Gibsons?
3) Did Vega copy this manufacturing technique from Gibson or the other way around?
4) How many other companies made their necks in such a way as to produce nibs?

Just curiosity about this. I had thought that Gibson was the only one to do this.

Thanks
Dave

it's really not the neck, it's the fretboard

I don't really know any specific history of gibson, but I have a memory of some comments made about the early Jackson guitars (my '84 Rhoads is in this group)...in that case the board was fretted, then tapered with a bandsaw (cutting frets flush with the edge at the same time of course), then bound (trimming flush with top of board necessarily leaves the nibs at the frets), then glued to the neck

I'm pretty sure this is just a time saving technique as I for one prefer the fret going as far as possible...if I ever get that Rhoads refretted I'll have that done as opposed to trying and preserve the original state...not likely that'll ever happen as there's plenty of fret left after the last 37 years

The nibs resulted from the methodology of manufacture. I'm not up on this but David Collins my business partner has studied the nibs from a historical perspective including traveling to the Parson's street Gibson plant to forensically examine old tooling that remained in the factory around ten years ago.

I do recall the wire wheel being a part of this story and we see the tell tale cross grain scratches on Gibson fret boards going way back.