Fret Stone - Fender Stratocaster

Frets wear.
Eventually they wear out and need replacing.
If the wear is not too deep the frets can be ground down to the lowest point of the wear, re-crowned, polished and the guitar is ready for a few more years playing before re-fretting.
This is called fret dressing, fret stoning or fret leveling - same thing.

One of the most important points to remember is the frets need to be level, if one is higher or lower than the rest there will be buzz in that area.
I cannot stress enough how important this is - you need the right tools and preferably plenty of experience to do this job well.
I'm not writing a 'how to' guide here, just showing what I do for those who are interested. I use this blog primarily to help explain to players what needs to be done to their instrument and keep my replies to email inquiries short.

This nice old '84 Strat came to me for a set up.

I always discuss the guitar with the player when he/she is in the workshop. It is so much easier to understand the problem and hear what they are hearing when we're together with the instrument.
This is why I don't do work for guitar shops, I don't feel I can do my job properly if I can't communicate with the player.
I get to meet a lot of interesting characters that way too.

A lot of the notes sounded 'dead'  especially on the first 3 strings and I could see there was a lot of fret wear.
The strings were sitting in large grooves and buzzing on the fret in front. These grooves were flat on the bottom giving the string an undefined area to vibrate off. With a well crowned, rounded fret the string has a positive 'point' to vibrate off and 'sings'.

  This guitar being a Fender I'm able to unbolt the neck. It makes the job a little easier if I attach it to a dummy body.

I mask off the fretboard to avoid any stray file scratches and to prevent the board getting gooed up with buffing soap later on.

On some maple (therefore lacquered) boards I'll use a low tack masking tape. A lot of 90's Fenders have problems with lacquer peeling off their necks and I don't want to pull any of the finish off when I remove the tape.
I use a marker pen on the frets so I can see the high and low spots .
 To do the leveling work I use a box section steel bar. One face has been machined flat using some pretty sophisticated machinery by an engineering company.
 I don't trust files to be flat and only use them for roughing off large amounts of fret if the wear is really bad.
 I use a thin double sided tape to attach 320grit wet or dry paper to my leveling block. The 320 scratches can be easily taken out later with finer grades before buffing.

I support the neck along its length to prevent any bending and grind the frets evenly to take the wear out. Most necks need some truss rod adjusting to minimize the amount of work needed.

I want to keep the neck straight between frets 1 and 12, remove the wear and have the upper frets falling away slightly.
This is where the experience comes in.
All necks are different so its not easy to explain - a certain amount of 'feel' is required. I'm trying to take the minimum of 'meat' off them but still getting rid of the wear.

When I'm happy with the stoning I need to crown. I mark the frets again with the marker pen and use a metal fretboard guard to protect the board from the file.

I use a triangular fine cut file from www.stewmac.com.

I need to take material from the sides of the fret without touching the top of the crown - a stray file stroke and one fret will be lower than the others. The marker pen helps me see how far I have left to go.
 This takes time.

Once the crowning is done I need to polish the frets up. I sand them with wet and dry paper being very careful to give each fret an even number of strokes with the paper. I go through 320, 400, 600 and 800 grades.
For the final polishing I use the buffing wheel.

It saves a lot of time and gives a great finish. A well crowned, shiny fret is a joy to play on - string bending and vibrato are effortless.
Then I carefully remove the masking tape, clean the fretboard (I prefer lighter fluid for this) and oil it.
The guitar is now ready to be set up. I've written about setting up before:

http://mrglyn.blogspot.com/2009/06/set-up.html

This guitar happens to be a Strat but the same procedure applies to all fretted instruments. If you play it - the frets will wear.

 Just a word of caution- if you don't have the right tools, not sure what you're doing or have no experience with guitar repair you can make quite a mess trying this at home.
I see quite a lot of roughly filed frets and scratched and dented fretboards - just thought I'd mention it  :-)


Cheers
   Glyn

………………………………………………………………………………………….

I am no longer repairing guitars - since covid 19 I now work full time making pickups

www.mrglynspickups.com

HofnerArchtop - neck problems

I see quite a few old Hofners, it's amazing how many are still around.
 It is, however, unusual to see one that had not had a neck break at some time in its life.

This one has not only had the typical break but it's been repaired badly. These pics show the typical Hofner break.

There are two large screws straight through the fretboard in an attempt to fix it. I've seen this before, it never works. I take then out and the neck falls off. But they leave rather ugly holes.

The underside of the neck shows a history of failed repairs.

There are two sets of bolt holes as well as the factory locating lugs.
 The heel looks even worse with two old screws snapped off in it.

Someone's put a lot of work put into this one.
This blog is about the repair to the fretboard - I'll deal with re-attaching the neck another time.
  First I remove the couple of frets either side of the damaged area.

Then with a sharp chisel remove the area between the frets.

I take it down about 3mm being extremely careful tp leave the binding. The binding is delicate, it's an old guitar and the plastic dries out and gets brittle.

I select a piece of rosewood with a similar colour and do my best to match the grain. It's not possible to get it exact but this one's pretty close.

It's important to cut it to the right size. It can't be so big that it pushes that old binding out and I must leave just the right gaps to seat the frets.
This grain looks good to me.

I use a couple of fret guards to ensure a fret slot gap either side of the fill and clamp it in using alaphatic resin to glue it in.

Here's the finished article. I just need to put the frets back. With oil and when the strings are on it should almost invisible.

It always seems a shame to have to fix someone elses blunders - right first time works for me.

Cheers
   Glyn

………………………………………………………………………………………….

I am no longer repairing guitars - since covid 19 I now work full time making pickups

www.mrglynspickups.com

Spotting a Fake Les Paul

One of my regular customers recently brought me a 'Les Paul Custom' to set up. It wasn't cheap (going rate) and I saw immediately it was a fake.
The hard part was breaking the news to him.
 So here are a few things to look out for, there are many more but these are the obvious, easy ones.

 
 On the fake the frets are placed over the top of the binding on the edge of the neck. Here are a couple more views.

 I've borrowed a real Les Paul Custom from Bungalow Bill's guitar shop (cheers bill) to show you how it should be  www.bungalowbills.com

The fret end butts up to  the binding and the binding has been shaped to cap the fret end.

The 'Gibson" logo is slightly too 'puffed up', a bit fatter than the real one. Look at the "i, b" and "o". The serial number ties in with a real one so don't be fooled by that.
 Here's the real logo.

   

I removed the truss rod cover to check the truss rod adjuster.

The adjuster is an allan key instead of a brass nut and the cavity is way too large. Here's the real one:

Finally I took the back cover off to take a look at the electrics. The cavity is the wrong shape, the pots are small Chinese ones, the wire coming from the pickups have coloured insulation, the capacitors are the cheap green ones and are wired up differently from the Gibson.

Here's the real one:

These are just some of the differences. If you're buying second hand ask to see these areas of the guitar. 

There are a lot of fakes around, someone's making a lot of money. 

There's a happy ending to this story - my customer contacted the seller who didn't know it was a fake and

gave him his money back. It doesn't always end this well.


UPDATE 27th Jan 2012

Just received a fake Les Paul for set up and they've changed the binding to look like the real thing.

This one was bought new as a Chinese fake. They haven't done as neat a job of the binding as Gibson but it's still convincing.
The truss rod, logo, electrics etc. were still obviously fake.

It's getting harder to spot them!

    Glyn

………………………………………………………………………………………….

I am no longer repairing guitars - since covid 19 I now work full time making pickups

www.mrglynspickups.com

Fender Stratocaster Relic - Trem problems

I'm a big fan of the Fender Relics. When they first came out I really wasn't keen but they are so much more than 'stonewashed jeans'.
To get the lacquer to crack and check it has to be thin nitro-cellulose which does wonders for the sound.

Guitars that are worn in all the right places feel wonderfully comfortable and of course there's no fear of scratching them.
Fender also put a lot of effort into ageing the hardware.

This trem looks cool but Fender don't lubricate the parts after the relicing process which makes them very susceptible to seizing.
 This Strat is about a year old and came in for a set up. When I undid the 6 pivot screws at the front of the trem 5 out of 6 of them snapped off.

This is the only survivor. The others all snapped at the top of the thread leaving the remaining part stuck below the surface. They had rusted to the wood. If Fender has used some wax on them this would not have happened.

So the problem was - how do I get the snapped screws out with minimal damage to this rather expensive guitar?

I used an old paper punch as a kind of 'apple corer'. This tool has an outer diameter of 5mm and inner diameter of 4mm. I sharpened the end and cut a saw toothed edge into it to help it cut into the wood. I name it 'The Extractomatic 2000'.
 The next little hurdle was how to line it up over the hole accurately without it skating across the guitar. I don't want to relic it any more.

 I opened the holes out to 4mm with a drill bit.

I placed the drill bit into the hole upsidedown.

 

The Extractomatic fits over the drill bit - this ensures it is centred and doesn't skate across the finish. 

I use a chordless drill. It cuts a very neat hole, perfectly centred.

I use masking take to judge the depth ( I don't want to drill right through). And hey presto the screw is removed.

The new holes are a touch bigger than the original ones but not by much.

I plugged them with hardwood.

Then re-drill pilot holes and using new screws fit the trem. It is very important to wax all the screws thoroughly.

With a Relic it's worth while waxing all the screws that go into wood - pickguard screws, tuner screws... Don't use oil, it will expand the wood and grip the screw, candle wax is best.

Fender should do it but they don't. If you don't feel happy taking your Fender apart I can do it for you.

So here's the finished article - you'd never know.



Glyn

………………………………………………………………………………………….

I am no longer repairing guitars - since covid 19 I now work full time making pickups

www.mrglynspickups.com

Stainless Steel Fretwire

I get often asked 'what's the difference between normal frets and stainless steel?'.
I first used stainless steel fretwire in '08 when a customer requested it and now offer it as an option when re-fretting.
 For most players new frets will last decades but some can get through them in a couple of years.
The subject came up again recently when asked to re-fret a couple of Maton guitars by Sydney based guitarist Gavin Locke 
http://www.gavinlocke.com.au/
Gavin wears frets out at an alarming rate - he plays for hours every day and it certainly takes its toll on his instruments.

This is his main guitar, the one pictured on his website. It's been re-fretted before at least once and there's a lot of wear again.
 He'd heard about stainless steel frets and wanted my opinion on them.

Most quality fretwire is called 18% nickel silver (it consists of 62% copper, 18% nickel and 20% zinc). This is standard in most guitars except for the cheapest. It comes in a variety of sizes and profiles to suit every player and playing style.

  Stainless steel is harder, a lot harder. It doesn't come in such a large choice of sizes but enough to please most players.
The advantage of stainless is it lasts longer. How long exactly I can't say - I haven't seen any worn out yet. But going by how hard it is to cut I'd say it will out last 'normal' fret wire a few times over. I'm hoping Gavin with his playing regimen will destruction test it for me.
The disadvantages are mainly for the luthier. It is harder to work with. Difficult to cut, time consuming to file, harder to seat, very wearing on both tools and hands.
A lot of luthiers don't like it and I can understand why. I charge more for a stainless steel re-fret to make up for the extra time and tool wear.

The big controversy is with the sound. Intuitively you would expect a harder material to sound harsh and metalic and there is plenty written on forums to back this up. I haven't found this to be the case. I ask every player to report back their feelings on it (it's their opinion that counts) and everyone has liked it. Gavin was delighted and somewhat disbelieving that his guitar sounder the same.
So for me it's a big thumbs up for stainless steel frets.

  Glyn


………………………………………………………………………………………….

I am no longer repairing guitars - since covid 19 I now work full time making pickups

www.mrglynspickups.com