Fret Slotting Table Saw Blade

I've been making stick dulcimers (strum-sticks,dulcitars) and was looking for a better way to cut frets. I found the blade, hesitated when I saw the price, then pulled the trigger. It's worth every penny. Build yourself a little table saw sled and start fretting.

good quality, clean cuts. Time is money. Unless you enjoy the process of manually slotting frets pick up one of these and a Fret Scale Template. It's so easy it's almost magic.

Great tool. Can slot a fret board in about 5 minutes. Very accurate.

Good tool, good service. Thank you, TW Felty

I love this blade and have cut a lot of fret boards with it. The only down sides to this would be the cost and no additional kerf sizes available. If you use this blade with stew mac wire you tend to end up with too much fret board compression which makes it necessary to use a double action truss rod to dial in the neck properly for fret leveling or you have to use a fret barber to shave the fret barbs.
These are not complaints, just observations. :)

A bit pricy for a saw blade but the quality is good. It would get 5 stars if it was carbide tipped or lower in price.

In a production setting, the stewmac fret slotting blade does not last as long as I would like it to...typically 200-300 fretboards. Extremely hard woods like bloodwood and ipe dull the blade within about a dozen fretboards. It works great when it is sharp, there are few other items like it available anywhere. I have about 8 or 9 dull blades collected over the last few years. I would be interested in a same-size carbide blade made for slotting.

Saves precious time and does great work!

I reccently purchased one of these blades from stew mac to use for slotting aluminium necks. i realise they are disigned for timber slotting but ive done 2 aluminium necks (with dead accurate slots)so far and the blade is still sharp. It took only a few minutes to slot each neck. considering that previously it took hours by hand to end up with less than perfect slots this blade is a winner for me. Note for Australian customers. check your table saw will accept a 16mm arbour (most table saws in aus seem to take 20mm or larger) luckily my dewalt takes a 16mm.
Cheers

This circular saw blade, when mounted in an accurately set up table saw, cuts a fine slot that readily accepts the frets, whether installed by press or soft hammer. It does however, require a sliding jig to present the fingerboard to the exposed blade at a precise angle, indexed by an accurate template. The flat plate(MDF)jig in the photo is held at right angles to the circular saw by a long timber strip that slides in the table top LHS channel, with a further two small guides on the RHS. The fret indexing guide is fixed by screws to the reversed blank fingerboard and registers on a pin in the sliding jig. The accuracy of the fret spacing is assured by the jig fixed to the fingerboard and does not require any further measurements.
I have been using the S-M pullsaw jig, which is quite satisfactory, but in my opinion, requires more care in execution to obtain the correct depth and clean cut.