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Hi michael , question did you experience any kind of anomalies in the wood after 2 weeks of exposure e. g. bridge warpage ? bindings gone wonky or kinked etc Thank you . I have used black dye NGR stains, but only on the surface, and the same with bridges using dyes and the vinegar. steel wool combo, have you noticed a colour change after steeping for 2 weeks and sanding afterwards??

Interesting thread!

I found this at my local this morning. It's 13"+ wide, 1-3/4" thick and 98" long. Should yield a couple sets.

Best, M

Bandings are OK. I haven't tried an actual oak fretboard. I just placed a 10 mm x 10 mm x 60 mm piece of oak into the solution, just to see how oak would fair in terms of depth penetration. My next step is to dimension an oak fretboard and steep it in the solution. I suspect when I remove it I'll keep it clamped for a week. A bridge might be problematic especially if it has thin wings.
When the wood comes out of the solution and left to dry it is a very deep black but it's only a surface effect. Cut into it and the colour goes a more grey/bluish black. The best way to deal with that is to wipe on a thin oil finish - something like danish oil. Oil darkens wood significantly and it imparts a much deeper black to this walnut and oak. For the surface of a fretboard you can do the oil sand fill. That achieves two things, it gives a deeper black and fills the open pores of the oak. That's how I treat bog oak. I think the vast majority of players would have difficulty distinguishing it from ebony once the pores are filled and the oil has affected the colour. The bindings are more problematic in terms of filling the pores although I'm not sure filling is necessary. It can be done with french polishing/shellac although it's a little long winded. The entire body (and bindings) can be hit with the Danish oil prior to French polishing/shellac. Just one thin coat, don't let it build. Oil under french polish gives some of the grain 'pop' of an all oil finish. You can omit it for the soundboard.

Will oak hold up as a fingerboard? And if so, will it wear through the treated layer between the frets as it is used?

I’m VERY interested in finding suitable and easily sourced alternatives for fingerboards and bridges. If ubiquitous red oak will do the job it seems almost too good to be true.


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[quote="rlrhett"]Will oak hold up as a fingerboard? And if so, will it wear through the treated layer between the frets as it is used?

I’m VERY interested in finding suitable and easily sourced alternatives for fingerboards and bridges. If ubiquitous red oak will do the job it seems almost too good to be true.


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I don't see why not, especially if proper technique is being used by the player and they aren't using the Vulcan death grip on the thing. I personally much prefer white oak over red. White also bends very easily.

IMHO, red oak is too porous for fingerboards. If you are going to dye the fingerboard, sugar maple, pearwood, persimmon, or holly are better choices. Less common domestic woods that are both hard and close-pored include dogwood, hornbeam, serviceberry, and sourwood (just to name a few).
I have some cherry that is much harder and denser than normal. I plan to use it for the bridge and fingerboard on my 'neighborhood guitar'. The back, sides and neck will be spalted hackberry from the back yard, and the top and braces will be from a Norway spruce yard tree that was uprooted in the great tornado outbreak of 2011. The EF1 tornado was no more than a block from my house.

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John

I have used white oak as a fretbaord and yes it is definitely suitable. I also use iron solution to ebonize it and finish it off with black ink. It looks like good black ebony from a distance. Make sure it is perfectly QS though because oak has a high expansion rate.

I used some soft shell almond wood once for a fingerboard. It's very hard, dense, and tight grained, almost like the best ebony, but resolutely brown. I've also used American hornbeam, AKA 'Blue Beech', which makes a great fingerboard when it's been dyed. There are lots of hard tight grained woods out there to make fingerboards from, but a dearth of black ones. I have used some black dyed persimmon, AKA 'Ozark Ebony', but the person who was making it has stopped work on that project due to lack of interest. Drat.

Another possibility might be to veneer the fingerboard as they did on some violin family instruments. A thick veneer of ebony, black phenolic, or a black dyed hard wood might hold up O.K. for most people. It would certainly be easier to completely dye a piece 1/16 of an inch thick than a quarter of an inch thick.
But there are still plenty of dark brown dense tropical hardwoods out there that can hide finger grime so that is what I'll use until they are no longer available, unless I'm trying to build some superleggera guitar, in which case I might do the veneer option.

Worse than ebony?

Where do you buy this lumber? I have what I think is a good hardwood lumber yard I go to, but I’ve never seen any of these more exotic domestic woods. They have walnut and cherry. Oak, maple, poplar, sycamore, ash. Imports like mahogany, sapele, IRW, paduk. But I’ve never seen mesquite, almond, or hornbeam.

Anyone know of a source in Southern California for these? California grows more almonds than any other place in the world, yet I’ve never even seen almond lumber.


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I would never use anything but QS ebony too. In fact for a fretboard I don't think I have ever used anything other then QS. So I guess it's a good recommendation all round. Doing a quick search it looks like the answer is, it depends on the ebony but over all it's comparable to White Oak.

One of my students got the almond wood in a wood pile in California. There are, apparently, two kinds of almond: hard shell and soft shell. The hard shell almond has softer, ring porous wood, while the soft shell stuff is tight, dense, and diffuse porous. It looks very much like cherry, except without the red color. It's a nice brown, but difficult to stain.

Osage and Persimmon are becoming less uncommon, which is not to say that they're easy to get. Tom Thiel, at Northwind Tonewoods, has a number of 'local exotics' of that sort, as well as locust, mulberry (think 'mahogany'), and others. Often it's a matter of stumbling onto somebody who has some. Many of these woods are actually not uncommon where they grow, but they have never been 'commercial' species. I'm told that the main use for Osage is as fence posts, which are reputed to outlast the holes. Apple and willow are common enough trees around here, but you don't usually see them in lumber yards. I did get a board of willow once at a hardwood place; it's used by decoy carvers. I've gotten willow from tree services: it's a lousy fire wood, and they have to pay a landfill to take it. The main problem with getting it that way is that they'll want to drop off a truck load every week or so. It makes great liners and such, but how much of that do you need?

I have seen pictures of older guitars like Stella's that had ink or dye on a lighter wood fretboard, but that now had worn ovals between the strings down to the original wood color. Does the coloring end up on your fingertips?

Ed

I have never tried this on a guitar, but on some furniture I have built. Cherry sprayed or wiped with a solution of lye and water can be brought to ever increasing darker tones of colour which are chemically induced. You can even ebonize it.

"I have seen pictures of older guitars like Stella's that had ink or dye on a lighter wood fretboard, but that now had worn ovals between the strings down to the original wood color. Does the coloring end up on your fingertips?"

Not usually if you let the leather dye dry completely.

In some states (like Missouri), it's illegally to bring in walnut from certain other states due to thousand cankers disease. Most States that produce walnut will outlaw imports from other states where the diseases has been documented.