The Fret Board Extender
By John Fisher
By the time we recognize a man's brilliance we've forgotten the stupid questions he asked to get that way.
It is necessary to put a support under the fret board area that extends over the body. I made this out of maple. I had a hard time figuring out how this was suppose to be. Although I did get some suggested info about building this mandolin, I have never actually seen an "F" style mandolin in real life so I had to ask a lot of people a lot of questions. Although the fret board extender is not seriously complicated I had to search the Internet to find pictures of how it is plus the pictures that I found were helpful for other aspects of building this mandolin. This mandolin is by no means a perfect replica of an "F" style mandolin and I made my share of mistakes while building it, but it still came out very nice and I'm very happy with it. "Live and learn"
In the picture I am shaving the fret board extender with a chisel to conform it with the neck and help flatten it out. You can see that I put a screw in it. The screw about 2 1/2" long goes on an angle into the heel of the neck. This helps secure better the extender and the neck joint at the same time. The fret board extender is also glued to the top of the mandolin.
This illustration shows an exploded top view of the finger board extender components. You will notice the piece of binding in the middle. When the binding is installed on the mandolin top it will meet at this binding that you see in the picture. The binding in the picture is just simply put there for a place for the other binding around the top of the mandolin to meet. That's all. This is the top view but but the angle will have to conform to the angle that the neck will be at. I will explain later about neck angle and attaching the neck to the body.
Not a super good photo, but this gives an an idea how the binding of the top ends at the piece of binding material at the fret board extender. The edges of the fret board extender that come out on the sides are rounded off.
This crude drawing shows how the neck joint will fit between the 2 small pieces of maple from the fret board extender.
This illustrates how the screw goes through the fret board extender into the neck heel.
There is no education like adversity