I have been playing this guitar for a few months now, and sukkeling to get myself, the action and the amp set up due to string buzz and so on, decided it is time to do a mild fret dress. My guitar log file notes that I need to do this in future. So I did. The guitar has had some frets replaced, and some derssing done in it’s life. Hope there is meat left for this to work.
Fretboard all nicely masked off, what fun. The high spots was marked with the guitar set up in playing condition, to see how much work is needed. A sufficiency of high frets and spots were found with the fret rocker.
Rough sanding down of high frets, after eyeball-straighting the neck by gently adjusting truss rod. Amazing how sensitive this gets without strings on. If this becomes a habit, the slotted straight edge tool will be made. Next time. All the frets were marked to see material removal progress.
Some frets are just more worn than others…. Or some strings work more than others on very specific notes. I received it with those. And some others now missing in sanding. Taking that out is possible, but the frets are rather low already. Getting to have the shape of “mini jumbo” frets. “Ya don’t like high beeg Jumbo frets? Wheell, sand ‘em down mister!”
While we are at it, service the tuners as well. Much dreaded “trapezoidal” tuners. Some slop by now.
This I can do without. But I will venture a guess that you will see stuff like this even on custom shop factory items. I sanded down the sharp edges of the covers, to stop this wood munching.
Hmm. Excellent design, don’t you think?
Tuners cleaned, “tightened up” and lubed with petroleum jelly. The slop is better on some, not on others, difficult to tighten those metal ears. Of course, lubrication makes them all looser. Sigh.
Fret crown thingymabob. Use relevant twist drill, drill deep hole, saw off most of it, and you have a "perfectly" radiused slot. It has two slots (wide and narrow frets), but it is not ideal. Plakking in the sandpaper is a hassle. I shall have to be creative and make decent crown files, this just being a long-term stopgap. These frets are getting low, next time a custom-fitted file will be essential. I am looking at maybe threading holes to cut open as above. On tool steel. K460 or such. Probably will not result in sharp cutter edges. Ah, note the thin line of black marker left on the fret. Sign of high quality fret-job.
Almost there. A decent crown file would speed this up, followed by a batch of crown-sanders like the one shown. Polishing out all the rough sanding marks takes too much time. One really needs that “radius bar” thing, with several grits of paper to take the frets down. But, you need one for each guitar, since it may be 10.02 radius as opposed to 9.5, or whatever it was when designed. And a different fret file for each fret size. Wide ones, deep ones, and so forth and so forth. Maybe that is why there are people making a living from working on guitars?
At this stage, just looking at the neck makes me imagine it looks better. Side effect of spending hours on it. Maybe time to save up and buy that MIA Strat, all set up perfectly.