The fretboard contributes to the overall theme of the instrument with the fret markers representing the phases of the moon.  I went with sea snail shell for the moon and black mother-of-pearl (MOP) for the “dark side of the moon”.  Sea Snail shell is a creamy color with blue and green highlights as it hits light. The black MOP will likely be very subtle most of the time with occasional flashes of color depending on how the light hits it.  A couple of recon stone aliens flank the New Moon at the 12th fret…of course!

This was my first fretboard using the CNC machine and it certainly was an education.  It took quite a while to draw in the fretboard, inlays and fret lines in my CAD program.  I also needed to create a jig to mount on the CNC machine to insure the fretboard was parallel to the machine.  The real challenge was the cutting, which surprised me.  Somehow I introduced an odd 40 thousandths downward tilt along the fretboard face which resulted in serious head-scratching.  No doubt I have an error on the jig that mounts the fretboard to the machine.  I wasn’t able to remove the fretboard as it would have been impossible to realign the board to the machine.  The solution was adding numerous additional CNC passes to areas that were too low.  Very time-consuming.

After all that, though, the results are excellent.  The fret lines are literally perfectly located to a couple of thousandths an inch.  Quite pleased! I’ve added a picture that shows the fretboard and headstock together.

Fortunately, my next tenor fretboard can leverage all this hard work.  It was worth it.