Southbound Custom doesn’t do all that much custom inlay work. We do, however, build a lot of custom guitars that often require something other than dots. I try to steer clear of any design that’s particularly ornate, but there are plenty of simple designs that can spice up a fretboard. The first question to answer when tackling one of these inlay projects is, “How many are we building?”
If we’re only building one guitar (or just one neck as the case may be), then I will try to avoid using CNC’s due to the high setup costs. The hand-cut inlay project is really only feasible for me if it’s fairly simple. Inlay is not my strongest area of luthiery, so when I can’t do a great job, I turn to computers and machines for help. It is possible to find many pre-cut inlay pieces in many styles and materials from suppliers. Stewart McDonald and CustomLuthier.com are two such suppliers.
Using pre-cut inlays is a great way to keep cost down on a project, while still achieving a custom look. Sometimes you just can’t find what you want, though. Below are a couple examples of customized projects that had to be designed and cut from the ground up. One of these was done by hand and one by CNC. Can you tell them apart?
The paw prints were cut by Todd Reith at CustomLuthier.com and the matching fingerboard was cut in-house with our CNC. Vendors like Mr. Reith who specialize in a given task can be a real help in keeping prices competitive and allowing us to spend our time on the things we do best. In this case, there was a good bit of setup time on the front end to get the designs in the computer, coordinate with vendors and design our CNC programs and fixtures. But once everything was done, the inlays dropped right in and looked great!
I did the moon inlay neck by hand. There were a lot of hours in this project. When I say a lot, I mean around 12 for the inlays alone. If I charged the usual Southbound Custom shop rate of $60/hour, it would have been a $720 inlay job! That doesn’t even include the cost of materials. This illustrates a point I deal with every day. If we charge what the work is worth, we often price ourselves right out of the market. I don’t want to launch into a lecture about the value of skilled craftsmanship and how low-quality Chinese imports have grossly distorted our perception…well I don’t want to launch into while we’re talking about inlay. It’s a topic for later blogs.
Getting back to an earlier comment about quantity having an effect of pricing, we can use our examples to see this in action. In the case of the paw prints, it was a variation inlaid into a fretboard that we already had programmed. The customer ordered five guitars with two different inlay variations. In addition, I expected that we’d be making more guitars with the paw print inlay, so it made sense to use the computer and CNC. We probably had seven hours in the setup. The other issue was that there was just no way that I could see myself cutting out all those tiny toe pieces. Talk about hours! No thanks.
The moon neck was a one-off, and it was simple enough to cut by hand, so I thought that the best way to get it done. Being that it was in maple, the cuts had to be precise. I was only able to cut the board by hand because I could use forstner bits to cut the pockets. In a dark colored fingerboard, filler easily hides small imperfections in the inlay pockets. Maple will flaunt every minor flaw. I had more money and time invested in the paws, but I can now reproduce those fingerboards quickly and with consistency. The moons cost me less, but should a customer ever request that again, I’ll have to start from scratch.
