Roll your own.. fingerboard

Hand rolled they call it.

So it was out with the old Victorinox and get rolling. Well not quite,  the single sided safety razor blade ended up my weapon of choice. That, some steel wool, a couple of files, one of those black foam sanding blocks and a little lemon oil. First point of call was Google and the 2ube to get a feel for the method used in rolling your own fingerboard. There was certainly some crazy ideas and plenty of others including the screwdriver method. This was akin to water divining where the shaft of a screwdriver was rubbed back and forth between each fret along the square edge of the fingerboard. This is known as the compression method where the edge of the board is compressed. Nothing to loose other than time and a few ommms so I gave it a try. Well it probably would have worked if I had a pine fingerboard but rosewood, I would have been at it for months. Time to get serious and try the scraping method so it was out with the single sided blade. Once again working between each fret each pass removed a slither of edge. After a few minutes I had a nice roundness from the nut to fret #1. I kept at it for the next thirty (or so) bells until I had both sides of the board nicely rounded. Now it was time to check for fret sprout so I ran my file along each edge very carefully holding it steady at about 45 degrees. It was looking good enough to apply the finishing touches now. A few swipes down either side with the black foam sanding block. This is quite fine and probably less severe than the finest of emery paper and produced quite a smooth result. The neck now plays faster than I ever will and it really does feel comfortable. It was lucky I had plenty of width as it is really easy to go tooo far when it comes to whittling wood. On my next one I will take a little less away and still have a satisfactory result. Live and learn. You can see in the accompanying photo how comfortable is is if you compare the fingerboard edges to the square edge you see behind the nut.