Acoustic Guitar Construction

Tonight I set to fretting a fingerboard I'd made with the help of Ken's fretting templates and whose slots I'd sawed with a saw from LMI. The frets that were included in the kit I was building up (I made a Martin short-scale fretboard to substitute for the 650 mm fretboard that came with the kit) were a serious nuisance to drive into the fretboard. Did three frets, on the fourth I got some chip-out when the fret just plain wouldn't let itself get inserted using a Stew-Mac caul in my drill press. Gave up on the giveaway fretwire and broke out a package of Jascar medium NS fretwire. World of difference. A different planet. Looked at both side-by-side and except for a deeper tang on the kit materials, they seemed similar, but in execution the Jascar wire just jumped into the slots when asked. Just amazing. I fought the kit materials for a half-hour to insert four frets, and once I started using the Jascar wire, I finished the job after an additional hour going slowly and carefully. Mercy.

Ken's been encouraging us to not innovate or get cheap. Boy, is he ever right. There are known paths to success and we aren't going to live long enough to discover better ones.

Sounds like the tang widths were different. The saw you have probably has a .023" kerf and the wire you were trying to install may have been wider.

Tim, a valid suggestion. The kit fretboard was already slotted, and I didn't think that the width across the barbs was different. It is. Kit fretwire is .038 across the barbs and the Jascar fretwire is .032 across the tangs. I suspect the problem has been defined, no thanks to my problem-solving skills. I was inadvertently mixing my materials, frets whose dedicated fretboard had slots to match, and my fretboard that was slotted for narrower frets.