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Well sports fans, I'm creating a other fretboard. This time, it will grace a 14-fret, 25.4" scale dreadnought, which will be the subject of a separate thread.

I've been invited to a get together of West Virginia luthiers, to be held on October 19, during the WV Old Time Music Heritage Festival. The State of WV is actually helping to defray my travel cost to attend.

So, I'm in the process of building/finishing 4 guitars, 2 OM's and 2 dreads.

I wanted one of the dreads to be a higher end guitar, so I've designed a fretboard, which I'll inlay. I just finished the design today and I'm ready to start cutting pearl. But first, I'm trying to dye some of the translucent iridescent mop into colors that I want to use.

Here you'll see the evolution of the design. It actually came from a wild hummingbird vine that I hacked down a month ago that was killing my roses.

I'm hoping that I can dye some translucent mop red, for the flowers, and blue and green for the bird. I have small pieces soaking in strong aniline dyes overnight, as a test.

The design is not meant to mark the frets at all. It's pure design. I inlay side markers for players.

Beautiful - I can't wait to see it start taking shape!

I'm to the point where I need the fretboard on the neck to finish the neck geometry, so I can't put it off any longer.

First, I needed to slot and radius an ebony board. I also need it shaped to its finished size. I prefer to plane the sides of the board to within ~ 1/32", then sand the edges.

After shaping the board, I cut out all of the individual pieces of the inlay with an XActo knife. Then I glue each one to the piece of pearl that I want to use, based on color and pattern. I'm in the process of cutting each piece with the coping saw.

I've finally inlaid the board. Hummingbird vines have bright red flowers, so I'm embellishing the flowers with red stained glass paint. It allows the multicolored iridescence to shine through the red. I'm also embellishing the leaves with green stained glass paint.

This is an experiment. Since the shell material is .40mm thick, I've glued it to wood, then inlaid it just below the surface of the board. The entire motif will be covered with ca glue, to the surface of the board, then leveled and polished.

I used this method on the rose vine board and it worked great. But, this time, there will be a layer of dried glass paint under the glue. We'll see how it looks in a couple of days. For now, the glass paint has to dry.

The stained glass paint looks very uneven in the photo. It's not as bad as the photo portrays. There's a lot of shine, which is showing up as voids.