This neck was for Ridgewing prototype #2, purchased by Valerie W. From the evidence, the fingerboard side dots have just been installed and rough filed flush, indicated by the file dust which is rosewood-colored with a white blush of abalone dust.

Elaborate inlay like the above can make it hard to see when you are playing where your fingers are or should be next, and simple green abalone side dots, although one of the most beautiful materials in the world, don’t show a whole lot of contrast. To make them more visible, an easy fix was to wrap hobby store brass tubing around each abalone dot, which, when it is polished up, it looks pretty sharp.

The brass tubing you find in hobby stores is made by K&S, whose selection of tube ID and OD is designed for all sizes to fit sleeve-like within each other:

K&S brass tube part #8127 is nominally 3.18mm (0.125”) OD with an 0.36mm (0.014”) wall thickness. These abalone dots are nominally 2.5mm (0.100”) dia., which is just a hair larger than the calculated tube ID, but in practice they fit together very nicely.

In this detail, you can see extra abalone dots and their brass tubing sleeves (top). Cutting the brass tubing to lengths smaller than their diameter is a bit of a pain, but a jeweler’s saw works pretty well if you hold the brass tube vertically and gently in a leather-faced vice with the length you need protruding. First gently ream out the roughness from the previous cut with a finger-powered countersink and bevel the outer edge slightly with some emery paper. Then gently saw the tube through while holding a fingertip down on the tube tip being cut so it won’t jump across the room when you cut through. Insert the finish end of the dot into the tube from the beveled end, and super-glue them together into an 1/8” hole with the rough end of the tube protruding. When the glue is set, enjoy the great satisfaction of filing that little bit of tubing flush.

A closer look at this fingerboard shows that the 15^th fret side dot has just been filed flush, the 17^th fret dot has been glued in but not yet filed, and the 19^th fret dot is next to be installed. The hole in the middle of the 21^st fret that looks like it also needs a big inlay dot is actually the access port for adjusting the neck angle set screw. Since the first Chrysalis guitar back in 1999, there has been a raging debate as to whether to leave this access port unfinished so that it is minimally visible, or else to disguise it by making it part of the inlay as the center of some pretty circle design. One might think to put in some sort of easily-removable abalone manhole cover to hide it properly, but in practice you quickly become accustomed to being able to instantly access and tweak the neck angle for different playing styles and songs, a fine adjustability unique to the Ridgewing design. Maybe some Maker out there will come up with an ideal solution to this design impasse.