Filling Guitar Fingerboard Holes

You know, if you read the title of this post you might have all sorts of mental images.  How does a fingerboard get holes in it?  Moths?  Lots of wear?  Maybe a crazed lunatic with an electric drill?

The latter is not too far from the truth.  You may recall we had drilled holes in the Guild's fingerboard for access to the neck dovetail joint to steam it and separate the neck from the body.

Now that the neck is reattached, we don't want holes there any more.

So we fill them.  I have some scraps and other hunks of rosewood around the Dungeon.  A few seconds with the ROSS, and we have some nice rosewood dust.

Place some in the holes.  I don't show it here, but I also packed the rosewood chips from the initial drilling onto the top of the fill.

Then take some thin CA (super glue) and put a drop or so on the pile.

Let it soak in.

I give it a couple hours to solidify.  A large amount of CA takes a while to harden.

Then use a scraper to level the fill down to the level of the fingerboard.

Scrapers are my new best friends.  I'm finding all sorts of uses for them.  Except I seem to have misplaced my small rectangular scraper.  I recall tossing it in a tool chest drawer, but I can't find it.  Dagnabbit.

Then we can sand the whole repair.  This is after the first pass with 180 grit paper.  Soon it will all match and be as smooth as the bottom of a baby.

Weren't there holes in the fingerboard?

One other quick fix.  The heel cap needed to be cut a bit to fit the re-cut heel.  So I did that and then epoxied it back on and clamped it for the night.

I find one of the things I don't like about these jobs is I have to wait (a lot) for glue to dry.  I try to do the gluing-up as last thing I do each night, so I can let it dry overnight.