Workbench Magazine September-October 1967 Make A Ukin 1.0.0

. . .  but fretted, strung, tuned . . . from the advertisement

A little bit about frets and instrument-building. There is a retired mailman named Wayne Henderson in Mouth-Of-Wilson, Virginia, who makes guitars. When a lad, he made his first guitar but it sounded like it was made from slatwood vegetable crates. Wayne wanted to learn more. He went to a top builder further south. This luthier gave him an old mahogany door and said, "Made a guitar out of this door, then bring me the guitar".

Fret slots are traditionally crosscut .023" wide within in the fingerboard. Wayne could not afford a fret slot saw. He instead took a hacksaw blade, hammered it flat, and filed it to spec. Last week in @aaronc's file discussion, @Gene Howe mentioned he tried an experiment stacking several lengths of a broken bandsaw blade together, alternating the tooth direction to make a rasp.

I remembered that experiment for some reason, and I'm getting to it. The hacksaw blade is a variation of the 20 most important tools in the history of civilization. Bet I could even perform an emergency appendectomy with one if I had to. With, of course, a bottle of grain hooch, some old gut violin strings, and a fishhook.