# Thoughts on carbon fiber fretboards?



## Bearitone (Dec 1, 2015)

Halo guitars offers carbon fiber fretboards on their custom models. I was thinking, if you coupled a carbon fiber fretboard with stainless steel frets on a maple neck you'd have a very stable, low maintenance neck and fretboard. I understand ebony is low maintenance but, I figured carbon fibre would be moreso. Your fretboard would never need another oiling and it's easy to clean. 

Thoughts? I can't see any drawbacks to a carbon fiber fretboard


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## HaMMerHeD (Dec 1, 2015)

Seems like it'd be damn difficult to drive frets in. Wooden fretboards use an interference fit for frets. The wood squeezes the the fret's tang, and the tang is barbed to dig in and grip the wood. This would not work with a carbon fiber board, since it is not malleable like wood is. I think this is why Parker glues frets to their carbon fiber fretboards.

You could probably formulate your resin to mimic the malleability of wood, but then you'd lose most of the advantages carbon fiber offers.

It'd be brilliant for a fretless instrument though.


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## GuitarBizarre (Dec 1, 2015)

The fretboard doesn't offer a great deal of structural stability to a neck in the first place. In fact, consider this - if you take a cheap strat neck that used tiny fretwire, or you buy an unfretted neck - you can force the thing into backbow permanently and irreversibly, just by installing a set of frets with a tang that's too wide for the slots without widening the slots first. In fact, on some still-used vintage instruments, this is a repair technique, used in order to correct forward bow that might have developed over time and can't be fixed with a truss rod.

Changing it to carbon fiber isn't likely to do much that using a stronger wood wouldn't be able to do.





That said, you're making a common mistake here - Assuming that because something is strong for it's weight, that it is stronger outright.

Normal everyday steel is many times stronger than carbon fiber. It just weighs more. Many woods are also stronger than cheapo, homemade carbon fiber when weight isn't taken into account.

A carbon fiber fretboard would do very little to stop a guitar from being affected by climate change or temperature. 



Secondly, there are many different forms of carbon fiber. It's a very versatile material - using carbon fiber it is possible to design, for example, an object that has a uniform dimension, say an inch thick square tube, that is flexible in one direction and not flexible in another.

This is one of the properties that makes carbon fiber very useful in engineering - it is a designer material that can be built to have many useful properties that would be impossible to obtain in a more uniform, homogenous material.

However the kind of carbon fiber most people picture when they think of carbon fiber isn't the kind of carbon fiber which offers these properties - most people will think of what's called twill weave carbon fiber, which has mediocre structural properties but does look very pretty. 

For strength purposes though, twill weave carbon isn't that great. If you wanted to build an object out of the strongest kind of carbon fiber, you'd probably use unidirectional carbon fiber, which is a boring looking, featureless black material, for the most part.

Finally, there are several ways of MAKING carbon fiber parts, whether you're using twill weave, unidirectional, or a custom layup of carbon fiber optimised for your specific form and needs.

I won't go into all of them, but I will briefly explain how they work.

Carbon fibers themselves are like hard human hair. They're immensely strong, but on their own there's really not much you can do with them unless you need a fabulously strong set of bristles for your clothesbrush or broom. They're actually very flexible and you can grab a bunch of them and bend them around like, say, the fiber optics on those funky lamps you see in gadget shops.

To make the carbon fibers stay in place, and form a solid object, you dip them in resin, to set them together and keep them in place. Now, when a force acts upon the bundle of fibers, their combined strength can be shown, rather than each fiber bending individually, splaying out and generally not doing much.

Most "At home" methods of making carbon fiber basically stop at this point - you lay out carbon fibers, or carbon fiber cloth, daub epoxy all over it and let it dry, bam, instant high strength material. 

Except because most of your structure is now made of epoxy resin and air, it's actually not that strong. Enough for most hobby projects but not, really, that strong.

To make it stronger, you need to have more carbon and less resin. There's dozens of ways to do this, from vacuum molds at the basic end of things, all the way up to the sort of processes that are kept under high secrecy or as trade secrets.

The most well known of the high end methods is autoclave pre-preg carbon fiber.

This is where you make your carbon fiber part out of a preimpregnated sheet of fibers and resin, which is flexible when wet and can be manipulated easily. Once your object is the way you want it to be and you've got your desired layout, it goes into a super high temperature, high pressure autoclave, which uses air pressure and heat to force as much epoxy and air bubbles out of your object as possible. Because your carbon fiber was preimpregnated with only the amount of epoxy needed to make the process work, you can be sure there's no excess epoxy in your finished product.

The downside is these things cost millions of dollars - Formula 1 has them, and that should tell you how much budget you need before you can just go buy one of those things.


It's far more practical, in this situation, to realise that the true potential of carbon fiber is vastly out of reach of mere mortals. Most small businesses would be lucky to have a nice vacuum molding arrangement, let alone a high pressure autoclave. Your guitar would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds if it demanded the use of aerospace or formula 1 grade carbon fiber.

Does that mean carbon fiber isnt useful to the home hobbyist or small business? No, absolutely not - There are several fabulous companies making high quality fully carbon fiber instruments out there, and they can do what you're claiming - they make temperature and climate immune, highly durable, pretty carbon fiber instruments. But they're not relying a whole lot on carbon fiber's inherent super strength to do it. They're using as much carbon fiber as they need to use, and while the soundboard may be lighter than a wooden one when done, it's probably not any thinner or stronger, it's just less susceptible to it's immediate environment or moisture.

Additionally, while they won't be using an autoclave, they will absolutely have some sort of expensive machinery in order to get rid of that excess epoxy and air out of the structure and make it stronger. - not to F1 standards, but certainly way better than someone with an at-home carbon fiber project would be able to manage.

This is purely a cosmetic option from Halo, and it might look really cool, I'll admit - but it is a cosmetic option, not a structural upgrade to their fundamental design. Which is probably why it's only available as a fretboard, where it's not doing any big structural job other than holding the frets in.


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## Michael_Ten (Dec 1, 2015)

^Holy cow, this guy just dropped a massive knowledge bomb.


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## DistinguishedPapyrus (Dec 1, 2015)

I think it'd be fine. Especially if it were a multi laminate neck... think about ply wood. It's cheaper and stronger than a single solid sheet of wood. Same with a neck, you can use multiple cheaper and thinner cuts than a single full piece of stock, glue them together with Titebond and have a neck, if done right, that won't shift a micron out of place. All the pieces are locked together and counteract each other's torque and tension to make the neck very stable over all. You could make the fretboard out of anything from balsa to marble and it'd be playable. It's not like it's gonna explode into a million pieces the first time you bend the strings or anything. Think of all the old strats and such out there that have a one piece flat sawn neck and have been playing just fine for decades...


As for installing the frets, that would be a pain in the butt. I imagine they'd have to have over sized slots purposely cut, and then glue the frets in place. Don't know the answer there, I'd leave that to the ones building the thing...


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## GuitarBizarre (Dec 1, 2015)

Michael_Ten said:


> ^Holy cow, this guy just dropped a massive knowledge bomb.


To make it less of a wall of text - what I'm saying is, carbon fiber is ....ing awesome - especially if you need a given, predefined amount of strength, in an object that needs to be as light as possible, and you can afford to change the dimensions of that object a little in order to do it.

But if your dimensions are critically important and you don't actually need to worry about weight, something like steel can pack way more strength into the same space. 

Steel has some other properties that might make it undesirable (for example, like most metals, it expands and contracts with temperature changes much more than wood does), but for outright strength? There's a reason we don't make many carbon fiber bladed knives, and why there's lots of knife makers out there using high tech premium steels. Because we to this day have found very few materials that are just that freakishly hard to destroy.


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## Andromalia (Dec 1, 2015)

Look around on youtube, there is a nice video of a company making carbon fiber cellos.


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## GuitarBizarre (Dec 1, 2015)

DistinguishedPapyrus said:


> I think it'd be fine. Especially if it were a multi laminate neck... think about ply wood. It's cheaper and stronger than a single solid sheet of wood. Same with a neck, you can use multiple cheaper and thinner cuts than a single full piece of stock, glue them together with Titebond and have a neck, if done right, that won't shift a micron out of place. All the pieces are locked together and counteract each other's torque and tension to make the neck very stable over all. You could make the fretboard out of anything from balsa to marble and it'd be playable. It's not like it's gonna explode into a million pieces the first time you bend the strings or anything. Think of all the old strats and such out there that have a one piece flat sawn neck and have been playing just fine for decades...
> 
> 
> As for installing the frets, that would be a pain in the butt. I imagine they'd have to have over sized slots purposely cut, and then glues in place. Don't know the answer there, I'd leave that to the ones building the thing...



It'd work just fine, yeah, although that neck you describe would move many microns. All the laminates in the world wont make wood not bend when heated or exposed to humidity, albeit we can lessen the effects by, as you said, playing forces against each other.

But in terms of "where's the advantage in doing this"? There really isn't one apart from aesthetics and cool factor.


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## GuitarBizarre (Dec 1, 2015)

Andromalia said:


> Look around on youtube, there is a nice video of a company making carbon fiber cellos.



Seen it. Great video, but their manufacturing process is very advanced and they designed the whole instrument around the material. They didn't just take the wooden design and do it in cf otherwise unchanged. Not really comparable to this idea at all.


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## TuffyKohler (Dec 1, 2015)

If you consider a 1/4" x 1 3/4" carbon fiber rod would be the fretboard, I don't think anything will move it. What size carbon fiber rods are used to stiffen necks? 

The slots could still be cut, and a fret with a narrow or flattened tang could be glued in, or, like Parker used to, glue on frets with no tangs


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## Bearitone (Dec 1, 2015)

GuitarBizarre said:


> No, absolutely not - There are several fabulous companies making high quality fully carbon fiber instruments out there, and they can do what you're claiming - they make temperature and climate immune, highly durable, pretty carbon fiber instruments. But they're not relying a whole lot on carbon fiber's inherent super strength to do it. They're using as much carbon fiber as they need to use, and while the soundboard may be lighter than a wooden one when done, it's probably not any thinner or stronger, it's just less susceptible to it's immediate environment or moisture.
> 
> Additionally, while they won't be using an autoclave, they will absolutely have some sort of expensive machinery in order to get rid of that excess epoxy and air out of the structure and make it stronger. - not to F1 standards, but certainly way better than someone with an at-home carbon fiber project would be able to manage.
> 
> This is purely a cosmetic option from Halo, and it might look really cool, I'll admit - but it is a cosmetic option, not a structural upgrade to their fundamental design. Which is probably why it's only available as a fretboard, where it's not doing any big structural job other than holding the frets in.



What are some of those companies that are making high quality carbon fiber instruments. That sounds really interesting.

EDIT: I'm going to get some more information on their carbon fiber fretboards and come back here

So let me ask you this. Would carbon fiber be a structural downgrade? I understand its not doing anything "extra" structurally but is it at least as strong as an ebony or maple board?

If it is a structurally sound material and the frets are laid in nice and snug then I think the benefit of low maintenance (no oiling, less susceptible to humidity and temperature) then I think it would be an improvement.

I don't really care what the carbon fiber looks like as long as its dark and colorless like a grey or black.


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## Floppystrings (Dec 1, 2015)

You could get a custom 1/4" thick piece, with a fretboard radius so the effect isn't messed up.

I would probably cost $400 or so if you use high quality industrial carbon fiber.

Or you could use the adhesive wraps they use on cars, there are some realistic looking 3-D carbon fiber wraps. That would be very cheap.

You could also use a very thin piece and "drop top" inlay it into the fretboard, you could use the wood edge like a binding.


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## marcwormjim (Dec 2, 2015)

My Parker was great because it was a great sum of its parts - I'd rather have carbon functioning as reinforcement within the neck, as opposed to just being a novel fingerboard material. And, to be honest, I found the phenolic fingerboards on my carbon-graphite-necked Steinbergers superior. I can also vouch for its performance as a fretless fingerboard for bass and guitar, with either wood or synthetic necks.


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## Hollowway (Dec 2, 2015)

GuitarBizarre said:


> The fretboard doesn't offer a great deal of structural stability to a neck in the first place. In fact, consider this - if you take a cheap strat neck that used tiny fretwire, or you buy an unfretted neck - you can force the thing into backbow permanently and irreversibly, just by installing a set of frets with a tang that's too wide for the slots without widening the slots first. In fact, on some still-used vintage instruments, this is a repair technique, used in order to correct forward bow that might have developed over time and can't be fixed with a truss rod.
> 
> Changing it to carbon fiber isn't likely to do much that using a stronger wood wouldn't be able to do.
> 
> ...



Wow, not only was that a lot of great information, it was incredibly well written. I don't know what you do for a living, but you're clearly very bright and very well spoken, and if I were in your company is move to get you promoted and speaking about whatever sort of engineering your doing. Your post just totally made my day. I learned a crapload!


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## Lemons (Dec 2, 2015)

+1 for a well informed opinion, this forum could use more people like you.


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## xwmucradiox (Dec 2, 2015)

If you're looking for the real "benefits" of carbon fiber in an instrument at more than a superficial level (like a parker fretboard being easy to clean and very tough) then you have to go full carbon. The only example I can really think of is a carbon acoustic for buskers because they're always outside and usually in humid touristy places. A rainsong guitar isn't going to move. The reps talk about using them as paddles for canoes in the worst case scenario. 

Most other carbon fiber that you can see on guitars is a cosmetic treatment. Especially stuff like the Thorn carbon fiber guitars. That's more or less a carbon drop top on a normal wood body. Parker did a similar thing but its on the back of their super thin guitars and adds structural rigidity. And they paint over it because they don't use the particularly pretty stuff like Thorn.

So you could make a one-piece maple neck and overlay a carbon board with the idea that you will be slotting through it and still fretting into the wood of the neck. The carbon would be there for looks and fretboard durability. There would be no option for fretboard leveling after the lamination so keep that in mind.


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## GuitarBizarre (Dec 2, 2015)

Hollowway said:


> Wow, not only was that a lot of great information, it was incredibly well written. I don't know what you do for a living, but you're clearly very bright and very well spoken, and if I were in your company is move to get you promoted and speaking about whatever sort of engineering your doing. Your post just totally made my day. I learned a crapload!


You're the second person to assume I'm an engineer...

Just to clarify - I'm not. I couldn't be without a lot of extra education. 

The hard part about engineering isn't knowing all of this stuff and how it works. It's being able to do the calculations that make the knowledge useful.

For example, I'm designing, as a personal project, some guitar hardware right now.

I could, if I had the education, look up the shear strengths, corrosion resistance, modulus, density and tensile strengths of a bunch of different types of steel, aluminium, wood, plastic etc, and use that to design what I'm building to use the minimum amount of material needed for the strength required.

I could even take it a step further and analyse the nature of the machining processes required to bring the thing to life - will a milling machine work for this, will the holes need broaching, what level of finish will I require, do I need a 3 axis milling machine or a 2 axis and some jigs, how many machining operations will I have to go through to get a completed piece?

Now the fact is, that sort of stuff requires a head for equations that I don't have, and a knowledge of industrial metalworking processes that I also don't have.

Fortunately, what I'm designing won't, likely, need that sort of in depth knowledge applying to it until I'm at the prototyping stage, in which case I will be able to just test the damn thing and not worry about it.

But if I were building, say, a suspension bridge, I would need to be able to do all of this - Nobody builds a bridge without doing the (Sometimes very complex) math first. Otherwise you'd be paying thousands of dollars to buy, say, thicker cable than you need. Or you'd build it too weak for the cable you "guessed" would be more than strong enough.

I'd love to get more involved in engineering, but I've tried to wrap my head around the maths and I'm just not good enough with the algebra to do it. Perhaps I'll invest some time in getting better at it, and maybe career change into something like that later down the line - but for now, I am not anywhere near qualified to be an engineer. Just someone who really enjoys talking about the subject matter.


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## Bearitone (Dec 3, 2015)

GuitarBizarre said:


> You're the second person to assume I'm an engineer...
> 
> Just to clarify - I'm not. I couldn't be without a lot of extra education.
> 
> ...



Everything you're talking about is materials, strength of materials, and manufacturing. I have a final on strength of materials (shear, bending, and torsion analysis) next week.

Its basically statics but stepped up a notch, and for someone like you who's actually interested in these things, it would be cake. If you have the opportunity to go to school for engineering you should go for it. Don't let the math scare you away, it goes by real quick. 

If you have any "real-life" shear and bending problems shoot me a PM and I might be able to help


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## Floppystrings (Dec 3, 2015)

GuitarBizarre said:


> You're the second person to assume I'm an engineer...
> 
> Just to clarify - I'm not. I couldn't be without a lot of extra education.
> 
> ...



You could master some CNC machine software and probably do pretty well. 

I am considering making my own guitars, buying all of the proper tools isn't cheap at all, but my ideas are overloading my brain. I spend more time designing than I do posting here.

My neighbor was an engineer at NASA for decades. He re-builds cars, he has done like 7 all by himself.

Get inspired.






















Wood.


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## Explorer (Dec 8, 2015)

Just to note, I love the fretboards on my Parker and Rainsong guitars. 

And no maple in sight. 

Great discussion, incidentally!


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