This month's lesson is don't rush things, focus on what you are doing, and a little planning goes a long way.
Didn't have a lot of 'me' time in the workshop this visit and much of that was taken up with fixing my mandolin. Dropped it recently, not too badly damaged, a small split in the top near the edge and a crack in the binding, nothing superglue and a partial refinish couldn’t fix.
But I wanted to make some sort of progress on Frankenbro. I had a couple of hours before I had to be somewhere else, should be time to replace the plastic fret markers with something a bit nicer. We’d previously ransacked Colin store of bits and found some 7mm awabi dots to replace the 1/4 inch plastic and some 3mm ones for decoration.
So first I drew a centre line up the fingerboard, which revealed that the original dots were 1 to 1.5 mm south of the centre line.
This kind of thing drives me nuts. Of course it doesn’t make much difference, I hadn’t even noticed till I measured it. However I really didn’t want to intentionally put the new dots in the ‘wrong’ place, but I would have to unless I bought some bigger inlays. But that would be against the ‘use what you can find’ ethos.
So I grumpily re-drew a line that was about .75 mm north of the existing dot centre at the 15th fret, less at 3rd. I calculated I could move it that far and the 7mm dots would still cover the slightly smaller 1/4 inch plastic ones, and it would be nearer to centre. I then drew lines for the 3mm dots, scaled in line with the two existing dots at the 12th fret. See the fallacy in all this? (a) probably nobody would ever notice, and (b) what’s the likelihood I can even drill to .75 mm accuracy on my first attempt at doing this?
