Official Luthiers Forum!

I have two boards and bridges if anyone needs them--FREE. They are 1 11/16" and 2 1/8".

Micarta FB? I bet you ment Nuts

No, I think he means fbs and bridges. For a look similar to the old Martin Ivory ones.

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

I don't guess I have ever seen a Micarta fretboard before and 1 11/16 x 2 1/8 will mot make a fretboard

If you've played a modern 15 or 16 series Martin then you've seen Micarta
fingerboards and bridges. I'm not sure it they use actual "Micarta" brand,
but even if not it's a black phenolic resin that's pretty much the same.
These come in just about any color you want, usually white for nuts and
saddles and black for fingerboards and bridges.

I'm really not a fan because Micarta expands and contracts with humidity
quite a bit - many people assume synthetics will be dimensionally stable
with humidity changes, but this is often far from true. The most humidity
hyper-sensitive Martin necks I've seen have been ones with the Micarta
boards. It hasn't been a consistant flaw however, so I wouldn't rule out
correlation with second grade mahogany used on these lower series
instruments.

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Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.

The Fingerboards are black micarta and are 1 11/16" width at the nut. The bridges are black Micarta and the string spacing is 2 1/8", they are also slotted for unslotted pins. Hope this clears things up.

I've used the "Garolite" brand phenolic for fingerboards on banjos with good results.  I use them mostly on fretless banjos, and both the tone and the playability of the necks I've used Garolite boards on are better than any other solution I've tried.  I've really not had any stability problems at all with the material (and I have instruments dating back 30 years or more with phenolic boards--Charles Fox was using phenolic fingerboards on guitars back when in the 70's when I went up to Earthworks...).

Geoff Stelling used some phenolic boards that had problems back in his earlier banjo building days, but other phenolic fingerboard banjos had no problems at all.  It seems to have been a bad batch of fingerboards.  Of course, every once in awhile you get some not-as-stable-as-you'd-like ebony too...

All in all, I think phenolics have their place.  I prefer ebony for fretted fingerboards, but for fretlesses it's hard to beat phenolic.

Dave