Cleaning out the fret slots

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I used a bit too much glue (UHU Allplast) while binding the fingerboard. The excess on top of the fingerboard and on the sides of the neck was easy to remove, but the glue that got into the fret slots seemed to be a much more daunting problem to take care of.

I bought an X-Acto-type knife and spent a little less than three hours scraping and removing excess glue from the fret slots. I first cut the little lumps loose from the sides of the slot and from the binding, removed as much as I could with the tip of the knife and then scraped the slot flush to the original depth using the back of the knife.

I noticed it widens the slots a little locally, but not so much it causes problems, I guess. And a few times the fragile tip of the knife broke (just a tiny piece), but I was able to remove those succesfully.

It’s a slow process, but it didn’t turn out as tedious as I thought it would be. You can clearly see the difference between a slot with excess glue in it and a cleaned out slot:

So, that means I’m ready to finish sand the fingerboard:

I just bought some good quality sandpaper of 180, 240 and 320 grit…. time to start sanding!