I’ve been sitting on two long billets of ebony for making guitar necks for a while. A couple of years, I guess. They’re about 40x4x1.25″ and were only something like $95 each – and they’re quartered or rift and straight on the flatsawn face.
Add linseed oil and french polish and they would make a guitar neck that would look like a bowling ball and I could resaw a fingerboard with the neck and make the line invisible. Like a pencil, it would look like one magic piece with a hole in the end for a truss rod.
But, it’s really too heavy for the job. There’s also excess in it and I thin it’s better used for knife handles. So, that’s what it’ll be.
To make sure I don’t totally give up, I trace a guitar neck template on the blank and before I use the whole thing, I’ll cut the waste off and use at. Translation, there’s enough for a gaggle of fingerboards or overlays still, or a neck.
I pulled out a card scraper to scrape the wax off the end and one face (didn’t need to do the latter) to make sure that the neck traced orientation is really dead on with the grain.
And I found this:
I wasn’t very attentive with camera focus, but note you don’t see much on the surface. It wasn’t that easy to see in person, but the card scraper gave up quickly (no problem if you can sharpen one quickly, just tough it out and sharpen more often) and the little tiny lines are tell tale.
If you get something like this, you won’t have to guess. Silica isn’t a mystery confusion, it dulls the edge right away, even on a scraper. But I can’t really see it and if you have something like this happen, just use your phone camera and zoom in and then look at the picture. No need to strain and guess.
Suddenly, you can see the lines are a lot more plentiful, and this board end was waxed, so these aren’t ambient metal dust. These being the little dots and plugged pores – it’s just silica.
And no surprise, all of the lines are about pore size or smaller.
In the unicorn article, I provided a method to modify the tip of an iron so that it would plane through this on long grain without being dented, but in scraping here just to look at the end grain pattern before cutting, it was just more of a curiosity.
Almost like it gets piped through the pores.
No amount of super steel buying will allow you to plane through it or just scrape it with a “normal” edge, but if the edge shape is changed some so that the little dots can’t manage to deflect it, then no problem.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 