Fretting (About It)

Will Reyer · Post by **Will Reyer** » Sun Jan 05, 2020 5:42 pm

Fretting (About It) 01/05/20

Back when I was a kid we bought what we had to but built whatever else we needed that we could. Neither of my grandfathers was a carpenter, but both their fathers had that ability, and the skills and the tools were passed down.

My maternal grandfather was a Public School Superintendent, and my paternal grandfather was a car repairman ( in railroad parlance a “car knocker”) for the New York Central Railroad. Most of Dad's home projects began with a cross-town trip to my grandfather's fruit cellar, to see what materials were available before we had to buy something. My grandfather would salvage and bring home the dunnage (the temporary blocking and bracing) that was necessary to ship machinery on flat cars, whenever a car was unloaded locally and it went into the fruit cellar. That mentality has stayed with me all my life.

When I was young you either needed a Gibson or a Martin, or possibly an Epiphone or a Guild, as all other acoustic guitars were mostly worthless, having tuners that wouldn't hold pitch, necks that would warp, bridges that would pull loose, and soundboards that would bulge up.

My first acoustic guitar, at 17 in 1960, was a $18 Sears Silvertone, black, most likely birch, and likely a Harmony or a Kay, parlor size. It was actually playable and I wish I'd kept it. Now days you can buy playable guitars for less than you can buy tonewood sets to build acoustic guitars.

I've got a used Martin GPCPA3 (spruce and Indian rosewood) I bought to use when I play out where amplification is needed. It's heavy, and, played acoustically, isn't as loud as the guitars I build. It does reproduce the acoustic sound, though, when plugged in, and it has the nicest neck of any guitar I've ever played, so I copied the neck form for guitars 6, and 7, nearing completion.

But I just bought a used Seagull S6 Original dreadnaught, 3 years old and Canadian cherry, for $310 and it's lighter and sounds better played acoustically than the Martin. Got it to back up the Martin, but now the Martin is the backup. And it's neck is good, too.

So all this carries over to building. Why not use local lumber, see how good I can make it sound? Is it worth paying luthier supplys outrageous prices for specialized tools or wood when you can buy nice playable guitars for less money than some of them? Maybe only if you just want to build your own.

The first guitar-building book I bought was Cumpiano and Natelson's Guitarmaking, comprehensive but lacking later important revisions. The first practical useful one was St. Teeter's First Book to the Oklahomans (The Acoustic Guitar: Adjustment, Care, Maintenance, and Repair, Don Teeter, University of Oklahoma Press, 1975).

Teeter specified the following for leveling and finishing frets, consulting my notes paraphrasing him:

Level w/sandpaper file (body shop tool) 150 grit. Shape frets if more than 1/3 of top is flattened.
Sand frets lightly with 150 grit in sandpaper file, then 320 or 400 grit w/d paper w/your fingertips.
Use pressure to round frets, then 600 grit w/heavy pressure, then #1 steel wool, buff fingerboard, lemon oil.

I've made a couple modifications to Teeter's methods, that suit me working in a farm shop:.

First, I want the top surface of my neck blank dead flat by running through my jointer. Then I want my fretboard blank jointed on one face and run through my planer on the opposite face to maintain parallelism. I want a double-action truss rod or a 1/4” x 1/2” steel bar in the sandwich under the fretboard in the neck blank. I sand my 16” radius into the fretboard before gluing.

Next I hammer in the pre-radiused frets, in my case Stew Mac #0148. If all the above was done carefully, in theory all the fret tops ought to be in one plane if flat fingerboard, or lie in one simple curved surface if the fretboard is radiused. File fret ends back flush with fretboard sides.

I don't have a long wooden body shop sandpaper file. There's a local company that fabricates granite and marble countertops for a big-box home store chain. What they break they put in a load-lugger, and let people take. That got me a poor-man's surface plate, 24” x 29” with one ragged edge where it broke.

150 grit also seems pretty rough for leveling the fret tops. I taped a sheet of plain old 180 grit garnet paper (on hand) down on the surface plate and very lightly, with a rolling action to accommodate the 16” fretboard radius, pushed the neck assembly with fretted fretboard across it longitudinally. Wet n Dry paper is better.

Look very carefully tilting the fretboard in a good light. Use magnification if necessary. You want to see a narrow strip across the tops of ALL the frets indicating where the sandpaper touched it. Note Teeter said shape frets if more than 1/3 of top is flattened. That's the secret to not having to do much fret work. If you have to make multiple passes over the frets on a flat surface to be able to find the sandpaper registering on each fret, you'll probably have to do some fret shaping.

I file the fret ends flush with the fretboard edges with a 10” mill smooth file. Then I put a 10” mill bastard file in my homemade wooden holder that lets me file the edges in a 60 degree chamfer to the fretboard surface. Some luthiers want a 45 degree bevel here but my old Guild D-35 that I played for 41 years had the high e string quite close to the end of the fret and you could pull it over the edge on occasion.

Next I mask all the fretboard except the frets with masking tape. My concession to luthier's tools here is the red-handled Stew Mac “U” shaped fret end file which is smooth on the bottom of the “U”, about $14. I dress the ends next.

Now if the fret tops are barely skimmed with a thin line left by the sandpaper, I'll just go to the next sanding grit. Teeter says 320 or 400 grit. Had 400 handy this time. This gets cut or torn to part-sheets 2.75” x 4.50” in size so it can get wrapped around my dressing tool, a piece of 1-1/2” Schedule 40 PVC plumbing pipe 3” long.

To make this I took a 16 penny casing nail, clamped a quarter-inch of the pointed end in my welding bench vise horizontally. Heated this with propane torch until quite red. Pressed the PVC pipe piece into this with more pressure at the clamped end to make the groove deeper there than at the outboard end I was supporting with the wooden end of my welding brush.

Burning PVC plumbing pipe, house siding, etc. makes nasty toxic fumes, BE SURE NOT TO BREATH.
Touch pipe to nail, get away. When the groove is made, it will produce a furrow of thrown up material on either side. When cool, this displaced material can be easily knocked or scraped off. The final product ought to leave you with a groove with the thin end about 2/3 as deep as the crown of your fret wire, and deeper and wider at the end near the vise, in case you need to shape the sides to restore a crown to the fret.

Wrap your sandpaper around the pipe, feel to locate the groove on a fret, give it 3-10 push strokes depending on how much the leveling passes modified the fret. Rotate the sandpaper marginally, do the next fret. After doing all frets I then reverse the sandpaper, which is mostly only used on the first half, reverse the neck assembly in my vise, and use push strokes from the opposite side. You can see the marks on the paper in my photo of components.

Then I fold the sheet in half, support it with 3 fingers pressing down while held with thumb, and pull lengthwise on fretboard. Lastly, fold the sheet one more time, 4 thicknesses, and wipe vigorously along the fret ends.

No waxing, steel wool, buffing, or polishing, just some lemon oil on the fretboard when complete.

If the frets really need to be reshaped, I've got a little triangular file that I ground flats on the 3 sharp edges and use with a scrap of aluminum flashing (beer can thickness) under it to protect the fretboard. But the whole point of this is to avoid having to do excessive fret shaping.

I'm sure a large number of repairmen and luthiers will shudder at my methods, cringe, and shake their heads. I've also got nothing against people who like to buy expensive tools – I agree good tools are necessary. What I need may be different than what you need. My friend Carl, who builds F5 mandolins, my luthier friends locally, and almost everybody at this forum exhibits craftsmanship at a level of magnitude beyond my abilities.

But I build guitars that play music. Mp3 attachment of Tjarko Jeen, a Dutch rockabilly guitarist living in Austin, TX, playing my #4 build, a ladder-braced guitar with flat fingerboard and 1/8” Russian birch plywood soundboard. Recorded on Garage Band with no enhancements.

See: viewtopic.php?f=30&t=2073