by Todd Stock » Sat Apr 21, 2018 8:03 am
If the board is well striped or a uniformly black ebony, the rout can be stopped just clear of the inlays instead of going all the way to the edge of the board...use some dust and epoxy to adhere and fill, using a naturally dark line as a boundary. With strings on, even a bad match is much tougher to see than you'd think - and better than having to endure the endless string of "You do realize that..blah, blah." comments.
This is also a common repair technique on arch tops with bad truss rod anchors, and a good reason to save fretboard end off-cuts...I have a dozen plastic shoeboxes of species-specific scraps for this sort of thing. As Alan mentioned, 5ths versus 4ths on the 10th versus 9th fret marker. Don't forget to change the edge marker out...DAMHIKT.