Time for deep confession.  When folks have looked at the inlay on the Ridgewing prototype necks, and looked up with big eyes and said ”Wow! Cool Inlay! Did you do that?”, I have just smiled and said nothing. But my smile was really more an internal cringe. Yes I did the inlay, but just the inlay dots on the side of the fingerboard, which consisted of one of the pearl dots at the top fit inside a short piece of hobby-shop brass tubing. Was I protecting a secret source? Kind of.

If you look closely, the inlay work is pretty darn good, certainly cleaner than I could have done even with infinite time on my hands. Yes, of course it is all CNC cut and routed. That is technology’s great gift to the task of production inlay. But someone still had to clean out all the little routed channels, fill them part way with some medium-fast set glue, fit all those dozens of little CNC-cut pearl and abalone pieces in, and press them down individually without cracking them, all before the glue set. I am assuming that the inlay was done on a blank fingerboard, then cleaned up in one sweep of an industry-standard swing-sander/fret slot gang-saw. The only problem we had with these fingerboards was that they were all warped, cupped up across their width by a millimeter or more, which is a lot, probably from the Rosewood not being properly kiln-dried. But this was easily fixed by re-sanding them on a belt sander with some really gnarly paper grit.

The dirty little secret in all this is the unbelievably low price we paid for these fingerboards, so low it makes me feel ashamed whenever I look at it and see the beauty it brings to the guitar. Just $80 when they were purchased two years ago. No typo - $80, for a fully finished fingerboard - real Indian Rosewood, all inlayed and fretted for a 25.5” scale. Using basic cost multipliers, this price means the cost of manufacture was in the neighborhood of $20, of which the materials – wood, inlay, frets and glue, would be in the range of $5, leaving labor in the range of $15. Having done a bit of manual inlay myself in years past, I have to say it is not fun, and I can see lots of little fingers working very quickly to put all those inlay parts in, most likely paid on a piecework basis, most likely little women’s and children’s fingers, and most likely not having fun.

The vendor for these beautiful fingerboards is a prolific Taiwanese guitar and guitar parts supplier named Bruce Wei Guitars whose factory is in Vietnam and whose store is on EBay. Last time I looked there, Bruce’s fingerboards were available with about twenty different pearl and abalone inlay patterns – Chinese dragons, trees of life, Celtic knot patterns, you name it, ranging from clean to gaudy, something for everyone. One good thing I noticed is that the fingerboard prices are now up 50% from two years ago, which makes me feel a little better, except I still have to wonder how much all those nimble little fingers saw any of that price increase.

Sometimes I imagine that the whole inlay and fingerboard finishing process could be automated. Having worked in technology, I can imagine robotic end-effectors being fine enough to pick up and precisely place all those little inlay pieces, with automatic machine vision being used for guidance and final inspection. Heck, look at how iPhones are made. A Chinese factory making cell phone components, which are a lot smaller than shimmering green abalone dragon scales, recently replaced 95% of its 850 assembly workers with automation, with the result that production is up 300% with quality issues reduced by 80%. What are all those busy little fingers going to do now?

So the next time you see some gorgeous big inlaid dragon on some fancy electric guitar that is priced through the roof because of that inlay, know that it cost the maker about $50.