I pressed in the frets with my Harbor Freight arbor press. I adapted it to take the StewMac cawl. I have only one cawl insert that is for Martin finger boards and that's 16 inch radius. The finger board on the Beard is almost flat - probably 20 inch or more. So I made my own curved cawl to fit the board from some hard maple. Worked just fine.
Then I glued it to the neck and did some rough shaping of the neck. Looking like it might grow up to be a guitar.
At this point in the assembly, I think I will do some sanding on the neck to get it feeling good to my hand. Then I'll apply a couple of coats of shellac to just the back of the neck just to keep the raw wood from absorbing crud from my hand while test playing. Then I'll mount all the hardware and string it up to see how it fits and sounds and feels. Just to make sure that I haven't done something dreadfully wrong that can be corrected before I apply a finish.
Things were going along great till I put all the wood parts and the hardware together, strung it up and cut the bridge inserts down so that I had a playable action height. I found that I had almost no break angle over the bridge. No down pressure, no volume. After some frantic searching thru the kit instructions and studying the round neck plans, I found the problem. The neck heel was at 90 degrees and the plans called for a heel angle of 89 degrees with a thin wedge under the fingerboard extension to get the strings up higher at the bridge and a low action. A 90 degree neck heel would be OK for a dobro setup but not for a round neck. The instructions said nothing about recutting the heel but the plans did. Half my error but half Beard's. I assumed that since the parts were cut so nicely that everything would fit together right out of the box. You know what they say about 'assume'.
I've got the heel angle recut and am doing some sand paper flossing to get the neck aligned properly. Then I will make an ebony wedge for under the FB extension. I've been cleaning up leaves from my yard and I need to go play some tennis this evening (indoors cause this is Minnesota after all), so I'll get back to this kit tomorrow.
I've never made a wedge for the FB extension before, so I made up my own way of doing it. I cut a piece of ebony scrap to about 4 1/2 x1x 1/8, hot glued it to a hunk of wood for a handle, and sanded it to a wedge on my belt sander. I split in half lengthwise, glued it to the edges of the fingerboard, and added another 1/8 in. thick piece in between.
I sanded the edges flush with the fingerboard and here's the result.
It's all together - in the white - no bindings, no tail wedge, and no finish. Just to see if it all fits and works. And it does! Needs a little tweaking of the action both at the nut and bridge. But it's playable and sounds good to me. Not as harsh and metallic as my metal body.
And the break angle over the bridge is looking good. It has more volume than it did before I adjusted the neck layback angle.
I'll play like this for a while and then get on with the binding and finishing.
