Essential Fretting Tools and Techniques
Welcome to StewMac's ultimate guide to Fretting! If you've ever been curious about doing your own fretwork, follow along as Gene breaks down all the essential tools and techniques you need to get your guitar frets looking and playing perfectly.
Video Transcription
Gene Imbody: Great playing frets are the foundation of every great playing guitar, so knowing how to fix them and maintain them yourself is a very valuable skill. I've been doing fretwork for 30 years now, and I've tried pretty much every tool that's out there, and there are a lot of them. It can be overwhelming trying to figure out what tools are worth the investment for the type of fretwork I want to do. So today, I'm going to show you my essential fretting tools, the ones that have earned a permanent place in my shop, and along the way I'm going to give you my trade secrets for each one of these tools to help you take your fretting to the next level. So, let's get started.
Three levels of fretwork
Fretwork is a big umbrella term, it can mean a lot of different things, from simple polishing and cleaning to tracking down fret buzz, all the way to major surgery on twisted necks. So to make it easier for you to decide what tools are right for your needs, let's break it into three levels. We'll call this first and easiest level dressing, which is basically cleaning up dirty or sharp, feeling frets. No major surgery involved here, but the most frequent fretwork needed. For the second level, we've got leveling and crowning work, which involves removing material from the fret so the tops are all perfectly in line with one another, and then reshaping the round over on the tops. If you're trying to fix fret buzz, you're probably in this category. Lastly, level three is all about replacement and installation. For those who are more ambitious and are ready to install frets in a new build or replace frets that have worn out.
Level 1: Dressing
Let's get into level one: fret dressing.
Fret Polishing
No matter what guitar you have, eventually your frets are going to tarnish and they're going to need cleaned up. This vintage Silvertone is a perfect example of a guitar that's in need of a fret polish, and that's one of the simplest aspects of fretwork that anybody can do. There are so many options when it comes to fret polishing supplies. Steel wool, Sandpaper, Scotch-Brite, Fret Erasers, tons of stuff. For me though, nothing beats Micro-Mesh. They come in sheets like this, foam pads like this, with this handy grit map to help you distinguish what grit is what. Sometimes using every grit for fret polishing can be overkill. That's why my favorite bang for your buck polishing tools are these Micro-Mesh Touch Up Sticks. This one here is awesome because it gives you three grits on one stick, and the great part about Micro-Mesh is its cleanable and reusable, so it lasts a long time.
Okay, let's get this old Silvertone back up here and tape up a couple of frets and I'm going to show you what this thing can do [Gene uses Orange Multi-Purpose Tape to cover and protect the entire fretboard area between the frets]. We'll start with the black, which is 2,400. Then we'll move on to the white at 4,000. See how I'm polishing across the width of the fret instead of lengthwise? I recommend doing that for an extra smooth feel when you're bending your notes. We're going to finish with the gray side and that's 12,000, and there we have it. That looks great, you can see it's much more polished than the fret we haven't done yet.
Another great Micro-Mesh option are these Dual Angle Touch Up Sticks. These are nice because they give you eight grits. There's one on each side of the stick, unlike the three we get with the standard one. You get a more detailed polish because you have extra grits all the way up to 12,000, but they go lower so they're really great if you have a little bit more tarnish and you want to start with something a little more aggressive to get that out of there. What I really like is the shape, that angle helps me get right down to the edge of the fret. I can get the corners, I can get the sides, so it's a little more versatile.
We'll start with our 1,500 and move on to our 1,800. Then 2,400 onto 3,600. Make sure you get right to the edge where the board meets the fret right around the corner too to soften that feel. 4,000 to 6,000. So it's also worth mentioning that these Micro-Mesh sticks don't remove a ton of material, so you're not at great risk of really affecting the levelness of your frets. Just exercise some caution, just something to be aware of. And finally, our 8,000, finishing up with 12,000.
Okay, so our first fret is great. This is a big improvement, but our second fret where we took the time to hit all the grits in between is much nicer, way higher polish, and where you're really going to notice is how it feels. When you get that string on there, it's going to feel like glass sliding across this fret.
For my standard fret polishing, I'm pretty happy with this, and a lot of times I just stop right here, but if you get that extra special guitar or you want to just take it to that next level of detail, we can do a little buffing. My favorite product for buffing out frets is Flitz Metal Polish. You can find this stuff just about anywhere and it works great. I'm going to take a little bit here, put it on a Q-tip and just get a little bit on the top of the fret. I like to buff this out with a piece of leather or shammy. This does a great job of putting a shine on the fret and also burnishing it. This leather is also good for coming up and hitting the ends of your frets and kind of softening those up and burnishing the edges of your board. I'm going to follow up here with a little micro-fiber cloth or a cotton cloth. Oh yeah, that looks great. A little extra buffing really made that shine. Strings are just going to skate across that fret. Repeat that process on every fret coming up the neck, and I guarantee you're going to notice a huge difference in the way your guitar plays.
Fretboard Protection
Let's take a moment here to talk about protecting the neck and the fingerboard. No matter what level of fretwork you're doing, you don't want to create more work for yourself by dinging and scratching up your fretboard. Some people like these metal fretboard guards, these work great. You can just hold them into place while you work. For me, nothing beats good old fashioned tape. You want to pick a tape that's strong and holds well, but doesn't leave any residue. Basic painter's tape works well and it's easy to find, but our Orange Multi-Purpose Tape is perfect for this job. It's a little tougher, it sticks really well and it flexes and it stretches, but it still doesn't leave a residue and best of all, it comes in three different widths. So it's really easy and quick to get in between the tighter frets and space everything out easily.
Now for a major caveat, using tape on a vintage guitar or any delicate finish can be a little bit risky. So something that I always do no matter what, is take my tape and I'll stick it to my shirt or my pants a couple of times first just to remove a little bit of that initial tackiness. That'll make sure that it's a little safer and it comes back up a little easier.
Now, for the most delicate jobs, I like to use Low Tack or even Extra Low Tack Tape. The cool part about this tape is it's very low tack, just enough to hold it into place so it's a lot safer on delicate finishes like we have on the size of this neck. See all the sparkle lacquer finish we have on here? Definitely don't want to pull that up by leaving orange tape on it for too long. So if I'm going to tape up this whole board, the first thing I'm going to do is use the low tack tape as a barrier between this delicate finish and this heavier duty orange tape.
So let me get this tape off of here and show you how I would tape up the entire board on a delicate vintage guitar [Gene uses low tack tape to cover the entire backside, and sides of the fretboard]. The other thing I like to do on this tape is just fold over a little piece of it and what that does is give me a nice easy handle [Gene folds a small section of the end of the Orange Multi-Purpose Tape over to make a tab, then covers the fretboard with the tape, only exposing the frets]. Remove this tape when I'm done. Now I'm going to switch sizes here to get this smaller piece [Gene starts to use the narrower tape as he gets closer to the body]. I don't need to keep using the widest tape. Okay, there we have it. A nicely protected fretboard. This is all taped off and ready for polishing. You could level frets, crown frets like this. This is going to protect your fretboard nicely.
Sharp Fret Ends
So another very common job under the fret dressing category are sharp fret ends, like we have here. We just released a video that goes into great detail on how to address this subject. You can find the link right here or in the description below. Sharp fret ends most often occur during dry months when the wood fretboard shrinks a bit and the metal fret ends stick out. It's a major pain to play a guitar with sharp fret ends and they can actually cut you. Check this out. I'm going to take this dowel and run it along the sides of these sharp ends. Look at that [small pieces of the dowel were shredded off like saw dust]. Look what it did to my Dowel. Imagine if that was your hand. You're going to need two tools to address this issue. One file to bring the edges in flush to the fretboard and touch up the bevel, and another file to individually knock off the sharp edges and smooth over the corners.
My favorite choice for trimming sharp fret ends is our Fret Beveling File. It has smooth-cutting parallel teeth that cleanly shave off sharp fret ends, and the edges don't have any teeth to help protect problem areas over the body and the headstock. It's part of a larger kit called our Snapfile Leveling System. It has this optional handle that accepts this file, as well as a variety of others for other jobs. I prefer to use it without the handle because I find it easier to control.
Let's get our tape out, protect these danger zones and let's get to filing [Gene applies Low Tack Protective Tape to the headstock and the body areas surrounding the fretboard]. You want to cut in one direction only on the push [Gene holds the file at an angle up against the edge of the frets and pushes it forward starting from the body working towards the headstock]. File the entire length of the fretboard, making sure to clear the body and the headstock. You'll notice that I haven't taped off the sides of the fretboard to protect the finish. That's because I actually want to hit the finish just a little bit. I need to kiss it to truly get the fret ends flush with the board. There's a distinct sound you're going to hear when you're filing metal, that sound changes when you hit the board [sound changes to a softer sliding sound]. Okay, there we've changed, listen. Hear that? That's the sound of the file hitting finish. Okay, these are looking really good. They're flush to the edge of the board.
Okay, so let's talk beveling. Beveling is putting an angle on your fret ends. Not only does that look better, it gives a uniform appearance to your frets. It also feels a lot more comfortable when you're moving up and down the neck. Typically, you're looking for about 35 to 45 degrees on your bevel. It's okay to eyeball this, you just don't want to go too shallow or you risk falling off the edge of your board while you play. There are some beveling tools out there that lock you into a set angle and those work great, but my preference is still doing it by hand. That gives me the freedom to set the angle to whatever I think works best for the particular guitar I'm working on.
Okay, our bevel looks great, but now we need a smaller, more precise tool to get in there and knock off the sharp spots and smooth over the edges, because even though we're flush, we still feel a bit sharp. We have a sharp point on each end and then that arch of the fret has come really sharp too. And hands down, the right tool for this job is our Fret End Dressing File. It has smooth-cut teeth just like our other file, and safe edges, one rounded, one flat.
For these sharp pointy corners, we're going to start with the flat side down. That allows us to get deep into the corner and remove that point with just a few strokes [Gene sets the file on the end of the fret edge and gently works the file in a downward direction]. That's it, it really doesn't take much and you don't want to overdo it. You just need a small amount of pressure and be careful, because you can still dig into the board with these safe edges. Now let's turn our attention to the arch. This time I'll use the rounded side down and a rolling motion to smooth out the sharp bevel. The rounded side of the file is some extra insurance that keeps me from nicking the board as I roll over the arch, and it starts a little bit higher than the flat side so I don't trim any more off of the points that I just touched up. Okay, we've got a nice round over on our arch. It's nice and smooth, but it still looks crisp and defined.
So this process has left us with some scratches on the side of the board and the edges of our frets. No problem. You can clean that up pretty much the same way we polished our frets in the beginning using Micro-Mesh sticks. You can start at the coarsest grit, hitting all those scratches, sides of the board, and the edges of the frets. You can even use the beveled angle to come down over the top and really concentrate on specific areas and specific frets. Move through all the grits until we get to a nice polish again and match the top of the fret. All right, there we have it, these frets look great. They're nice and polished and smooth and they're ready to play on.
Level 2: Leveling & Crowning
Now that we know some basics of fretwork, let's go a little deeper into fret leveling, or filing the fret tops to ensure they're all in line with one another, and then fret crowning or reshaping the resulting flat tops to be round again.
Fixing Unseated Frets
One of the most common and overlooked reasons your frets are unlevel or you're getting fret buzz is that they're unseated. They've come loose from the board or they just weren't sunk completely to the board to begin with. Very few factory guitars are going to be gluing their frets down and even if you have a guitar that has frets that are glued, that's still no guarantee they don't pop up at some point.
Look at the ninth fret here on this Jazzmaster. It's obviously loose, there's a big gap there. You can see how much it springs when I press on it. Sometimes they're not so obvious though, it can look like it's seated and it doesn't really reveal itself until you do press on it. Like look at the fret before it. When I press on it, I can see that gap opening back up. Now if you look at the frets on either side of those two, those are nice and seated. I don't see any movement there, they're solid to the board. If you try to level frets that are unseated, you're removing perfectly good fret material to preserve an air gap that's underneath your fret. That doesn't look good. First of all, it can feel sharp and catch your strings on the end, and it can kill your tone. You can have dead spots or just weird noises on frets like that that aren't perfectly seated. So if you really take the time now to make sure that all of these frets are perfectly seated and perfectly solid to the board, it's going to ensure that the rest of the job goes smoothly and that all of your work is way more accurate.
So our first essential tool for this step may not be one you're expecting when we're talking about leveling frets. The Fret Hammer, not only is this a must-have when you're installing frets, more on that later, it's also a great tool for seating unseated frets. You can try to lightly tap the fret back down, but most of the time it's just going to spring back up. What we really need to do is glue this fret and hold it down. Let me show you a little trick I do to my fret hammer that makes it a good tool for gluing down loose fret ends. I took a round needle file, you could use a nut file or any small round file, and I cut a slot right on the edge [Gene cuts the slot on the brass convex face side of the hammer] and then I sanded it and polished it out really smooth. This notch helps me hold down a fret for gluing. Let me show you what I mean.
We're going to hold the fret down and we're going to use a little bit of paste wax on each side, that's going to keep the glue from sticking to the board or our fret. I want to wipe up any excess I have here and then I want to take just a few drops of our liquid Super Glue on a razor blade. The razor blade is going to fit right down in our opening here [Gene angles the razorblade down into the opening under the fret] and that glue is going to wick right in where we need it. Then we're going to use our paper towel again to wipe off any excess and then we're going to take our fretting hammer with that notch we created, that's going to hold us down on top of the fret without slipping off and we're going to hold it down and brush on a little bit of accelerator and we're going to wait 15 or 20 seconds here for that to dry, and then we're going to have a nicely seated fret. And now I'm just going to repeat that process on the other fret.
Fret Leveling
Sometimes seating a fret is all that it takes to make it level with the other frets. Either way, now that that is done, we can get an accurate idea of how level or unlevel our frets are by using straight edges. Now when I'm talking about a straight edge, I don't just mean like a long ruler or something that looks straight. I'm talking about a tool that was precision ground and made of quality materials to be within a specific tolerance. This is one of our aluminum straight edges and it's been machined within a tolerance of plus or minus .0015" per foot. That's very accurate. fretwork is a game of thousands and you need precision tools to do precise work.
There are a lot of different options for straight edges, but the one I reach for most of the time is this 2-in-1 Precision + Notched Straightedge. These come in a couple of different scale links, but one side is straight, flat for checking the tops of your frets, but the other side is notched to fit around the frets so you can check the straightness of the board itself. The two measurements aren't always the same and it's important to know the difference. I'm going to show you why. The short scale version of our notched straight edge fits a lot of different Gibsons. This one here, checking in the playing position with the notched side, I can see that we have a pretty substantial up-bow. I can see a gap going down the center here. The fretboard is the foundation of your fret job. If the foundation of your house isn't flat, it's going to make getting a level roof difficult, if not impossible.
So I'm going to go ahead and tighten this truss rod by turning it right to straighten out my neck using my notched straight edge to help me get there. This looks good, this is reasonably straight. Unless we're willing to pull these frets and level this board out, we're going to choose what we call straight, straight enough, basically. So what I did was tighten this truss rod. I turned it to the right to close this gap in the center. But at a certain point if this gap opens up before this gap closes, I'm going to loosen the rod just slightly until the gap at my first fret closes, and that is what I'm going to call straight.
I like to use a basic set of Feeler Gauges that you can get at just about any hardware store, to see if that gap that I saw with that light is trivial enough to remove out of the tops of the frets. My goal here is to get an accurate fret level while removing as little fret material as possible. As a general rule of thumb, I try to stay away from removing more than about 20% of my fret material.
A standard fret generally measures about .040" to .050" tall. We're talking about removing less than about .008" - .010" of material, total. I want to keep it as little as possible because the flatter we make these frets, the more re-crowning work I have to do later. There are circumstances where I may need to remove more than 20% of my fret material, but for a beginner, that's just kind of a good window to be thinking if I need to remove that much material, should I maybe be doing a re-fret? And we'll get into that in the next section, but that's a good starting point. If we keep it under that .008" to .010" range, we should be good to go. .008" to .010" isn't a lot, it's hard to picture. That's why I like to use Feeler Gauges, so you can accurately measure the gap you're seeing. Your eyes will tell you you have a gap, but they won't tell you what it measures. That's why Feeler Gauges are so helpful, they keep you accurate.
So let's get back to our Gibson. Let's use some Feeler Gauges to measure any light gaps we see on the top of the frets, and we'll see if this is in an acceptable range to go forward with a fret level. So what I'm seeing here is that the maximum gap I have anywhere is about .030" of an inch, which is well under the 20% limit we put on ourselves, so that's no problem at all. What it's telling me is that over the years we've just kind of worn these frets flat and we have some unlevel spots and this just needs to be cleaned up. So this is a perfect candidate for just a standard fret level, and we're going to do that now.
You might be tempted at this point to just reach for the long leveling bar and hit all the tops of those frets until we're level, but remember, we're aiming to take the least amount of material we can off the tops of these frets. To be more precise, we need to pinpoint what areas to target first, and for that, we're going to need shorter-length straight edges. I like to think of straight edges as my flashlight in the dark, and the more sizes I have, the brighter my flashlight to help me zero in on those problem areas.
Let's start with a very simple example. This long straight edge is touching all 22 frets, but look what happens if fret number two happens to be tall. Now I'm touching fret number two and fret number 22. This long straight edge tells me nothing about what's going on with the frets in between those two points, and it would be easy to mistake this reading as a back-bow or a low first fret.
Here's another example. Let's say I have high frets at the other end of the neck, which is actually pretty common. All of these frets are high but level to one another. Now my long straight edge is touching the first fret in fret number 17, the first one of that high group. Again, that leaves me with a mysterious gap between those two frets and a gap over the frets past 17. With this long straight edge, we might wrongly assume that frets number 18 through 22 are lower than fret 17. If I come in with a long leveler of equal length and level, all of these frets at once, I'll hit the high frets at the end of the neck, but I'm also going to hit the good frets at the start of the neck. A better solution here would be to use a shorter straight edge to isolate the frets that are throwing off my reading with the longer straight edge.
A medium-sized straight edge would help us further confirm this, since it would be contacting all the previous frets before 17, but then bumping into fret 17. Then we can level off our highest frets first until they fall in line with the other frets, then hit the entire board as a whole just to blend everything in and our fret will be perfectly level and we won't remove any material that's unnecessary. This was a very simplified example. We're going to be putting this theory into practice coming up in the video, but hopefully, that demonstrates to you why one long leveler or one long straight edge may not be enough to give you really accurate results.
So check this thing out. This is our Fret Rocker. This may not look like a straight edge, but it's actually four straight edges in one. What this allows us to do is zero down into even smaller and smaller groups of frets until we find groups of three where one fret rocks. If we have a group of three and it rocks, we know that the fret in the middle is taller than the two frets around it. That's extremely helpful when you have a neck that's playing pretty well, but you have a few little stubborn buzzy spots. You can use this to track those down. Let me show you what I'm talking about.
This guitar plays pretty well. All the notes are playing pretty cleanly, but look, we've got a fret that's giving us a problem right there, so let's check it out. There it is. It happens when we fret at the fourth fret, but it's rarely the fret were on, it's usually the string hitting the fret that's ahead of it. So our fifth fret is probably high here. Let's get in here and check with the fret rocker and see what we find. Let's start here on the fifth fret [Gene sets the Fret Rocker on top of the frets]. Oh yeah, pretty substantial rock there. Let's move towards the base and see. A little less of a rock there. No rock in the center, no rock on the base. Okay, so we're high on the end of our fifth fret. That's often a sign of a fret end that's popped up and become unseated.
So the first thing we need to do is to check to make sure that that fret is solid. So let's get down here and take a close look and press on it. I don't see a gap. I don't see any movement or flex, so we're solid to the board, but we're rocking pretty badly right here. It's obviously the cause of this buzz. Our string is hitting this fret and not ringing clearly, so we need to come down and level it off to the two frets around it. Before we do that, it's worth noting something really quick about the Fret Rocker. Whenever you're checking a fret, make sure you're holding it perpendicular to the fret, not parallel to the edge of the board or the string, but at a right angle to the fret you're checking, because each one of these frets are radiused. If you're at too much of an angle, the fret in front can actually drop off a little and you risk getting a rock no matter what, even if the frets are level.
Our companion to the Fret Rocker is the Fret Kisser. It's a pretty similar tool, same shape, but it's wider and in the middle of each one of these straight edge sides, there is some diamond abrasive, that's a level with the two sides around it. So this allows us to come in on the high fret that we isolated and just kiss off the top, take off that high spot, and level it to the two frets on either side. So I'm going to de-tune this string a little bit. In minor cases like this, we don't need to remove all the strings. I'm not even going to bother taping any of this up, I'm just going to come in and knock that high spot off. We're going to come in here with this diamond abrasive and hit the top of this fret, level it to these two.
As I get close, I sometimes like to move back and forth with the bending of the string. Okay, the sound has changed because we've leveled the high fret and now we're hitting all three. So let's come back in here with our Fret Rocker. I don't see any more rock in that, it looks level. This is going to need to be re-crowned and polished out, but let's put these strings back on and see if we still hear a buzz. Success.
So the Fret Kisser counts as our smallest leveler, our micro leveler. For longer groups of frets, I like to use these Fretbars, and for the same reason we want multiple-length straight edges, having different sizes of fret levelers is important too. With the longest and the shortest, combined with my Fret Kisser, I can cover a lot of ground with those three tools. The cool thing about these fret bars is that the machined surface, the flat side is made thin enough to fit between the strings and underneath them. That's going to allow us to level frets under string tension, and that's important because some necks behave differently under string tension and that could be difficult to recreate when the strings are off. So you'll take the strings off, you'll level your frets, you'll do perfect work, you string it back up and then you still have some buzzy spots because they don't show until you have string tension affecting the neck. These are going to allow us to get that much more precise without a huge investment in other equipment.
So let's level some frets. I like to do this in the playing position because just like string tension, gravity also affects how this neck behaves. We're just going to prop it up on the bench. We're going to do the work right here, so let's get going. I'm going to use the string jack to get the strings up, off and give me a little extra room here. I start by using Feeler Gauges to get a sense of where my gaps are and I can mentally map out the board and figure out where I want to focus on first.
Here I'm seeing that most of my gaps are in the middle of the board, so I'm going to be sanding the frets on either side of those to gradually blend them into those middle frets. I blue in everything with a sharpie so I can monitor my progress as I sand, and I tape up my danger zones over the body. I'm going to use some 400-grit sandpaper here. I'm not seeing much of a gap, .020" or .030", so it's not going to take much to get through that. This paper is self-adhesive and I'm going to stick it to my shortest fret bar and then I'm going to tackle what looks like the tallest frets towards the body. That's pretty common to see, people play on these frets less so they don't wear out as fast. Sometimes you even find a hump or a rise at the end of the board. Then I'll stick with the same short Fretbar and hit my taller at the other end at the headstock. Then I switch it up to this large Fretbar and I blend all of these frets together.
Fret Radiusing
Okay, I can see the sharpie has worn off most all of my frets, so I'm going to come back in here with my Feeler Gauges, check the treble side, check the bass side, so we're looking really good here, we are level within a 0.001" of an inch everywhere, but we're going to stop there because necks are not flat. They have a radius to them. So since we were on here with flat leveling bars, we want to come back through here and touch this up with the radius block to ensure that our radius of our frets matches the radius of the board. That way we can match the bridge to that and everything will feel right. If the radius is off, the guitar's not going to play well.
In terms of radius blocks, you have a couple of options. We sell aluminum ones in various radii and various lengths, and those are great. They're very heavy duty and they'll last a lifetime, but if we're talking essentials, my favorite are just the 8" wooden Radius Blocks. I can use these for a variety of things and I can cut them up into different lengths to suit my needs. This Gibson has a 12-inch radius. We verified that using a Radius Gauge, if you don't know what radius you're dealing with, you probably want to invest in a set of gauges. You'll notice I took the strings off because we can't radius underneath the strings under tension. So the first thing I need to do is readjust the truss rod to straighten this neck out now that it doesn't have string tension.
Let's put some 600-grit sandpaper on this radius block. We don't need to remove much, so we don't need anything too aggressive, and to give ourselves a good visual, we're going to come back in and blue our fret tops one more time [Gene uses a blue sharpie marker to color the fret tops]. I'm going to work from the end of the neck forward and this shouldn't take much [Gene works the radius block up and down the fretboard]. We're going to go until we remove all the blue and we know that we're at an accurate 12-inch radius. That looks pretty good. We've evenly removed color on pretty much all of these frets. Let's check it with a radius gauge just to make sure, looking good, okay.
Fret Crowning
Okay, I've cleaned up my radius on my frets. It's matching the fretboard now, we're all good to go there, but we're not done yet. We have a bunch of flat frets now and we need to re-crown those, and by that I mean we're going to come in with a file and take these flat fret tops and reshape them and put a nice clean round back on the top of them. A nicely rounded clean top on your fret feels better, it plays better. Putting a crown back on here ensures that each one of these frets has the exact same point where the string contacts the fret. What's most important is that all of your frets are shaped the same so that you're consistent going up the board, you're intonating off the same spot on each fret.
The top of the fret has what we like to call a landing strip, right now it's really wide, we flattened that out leveling these frets off. We're going to reshape that and we're going to narrow our landing strip to a really clean, fine line going down the center of each one of these frets.
There are a lot of different options for fret crowning files. 3-Corner Files, concave files, diamond files. It can be difficult to choose which one's right for you. Luckily, my good friend Erick Coleman has done a video running through all the different options and listing a lot of his favorites. You can check that video out here or the link is in the description below. But even with all of these options, if I was only going to pick one file to live in my toolbox permanently, hands down, it would be the Original Z-File. This was also designed by Erick Coleman and Dan Erlewine, and it's different from any other file you're going to find.
This tool has two 300-grit diamond abrasive edges. On each side, there's an offset angle which allows me to shape different levels on the fret on both sides simultaneously. Let me blue in the top of this fret with the marker and I'll show you what I mean. How this works is that it shapes the fret higher on one side and lower on the other. They are like two mini three-corner files that work in tandem on both sides of the fret and I'm sculpting my round back into shape and flipping the file around to swap high and low sides as I go and narrow my line. The design of the Z-File with these high offset V-shaped peaks keeps you from accidentally contacting the landing strip where the string touches the fret, so it protects you from inadvertently lowering the fret and creating a buzz. Okay, I'm going to stop here, this is what I like to see, a nice thin clean line.
So now I'm going to go forward and I'm going to do the same thing to the rest of these frets [Gene tapes up the fretboard and crowns the rest of the frets]. And then we're going to employ the skills we learned in level one to sand and polish these out and make them look great. Okay, our fret level is complete and these look awesome. These frets were low and flat and starting to tarnish. Now they're perfectly level across the entire board and they're going to play beautifully.
Level 3: Fret Replacement & Installation
Okay, we've gone through the beginner and intermediate stages of fretwork. Now let's focus on something more advanced fret replacement and installation.
Removing Old Frets
This involves removing the old frets, preparing the wooden fretboard surface, and then installing new fretwire. So why would you need a fret replacement? Well, 99% of the time it's because you played the guitar so much that you wore the frets out, like this old '60s Melody Maker I have here. This is what we would call a player's grade vintage guitar, meaning it's not a collector's piece, it was somebody's workhorse and it shows. Check these frets out, years, probably even decades of playing have worn them flat and low.
These divots may not look like much, but by the time I get through them and level out this board, I may lose 30% of the height of what's already a very low fret. If this guitar was 100% original, mint condition, it would be worth the time to go through and level and dress 22 frets. I'm not going to lie, it is a total pain in the (beep) to sit here by hand on 22 frets and shape an accurate crown so that your intonation is perfect all the way up and down. So starting from scratch with the fret replacement is going to save us a lot of tedious effort and we're going to end up with a better outcome.
There's wear all the way up and down this board, but you'll notice that the worst of it is confined to about the first five frets where we see all these divots. That's pretty common and a lot of people might opt to replace just those five frets, a partial re-fret. The problem with that is it's still a ton of very tedious work. I'm going to take five brand-new frets and immediately wipe off enough good material to match the height of my remaining frets. It leaves me with low flat frets that all need to be crowned again. The second problem is that it doesn't allow me the ability to level out any inconsistencies that are in the fretboard, and although I can work around some minor problems in the tops of the frets if I need to, it's so much easier if I can pull these frets and level our foundation first.
And the bonus with being able to do a complete re-fret is that we can choose our Fretwire and the owner of this guitar wants to go with this. It's a little bit narrower and a little bit taller. So I'm going to show you a basic but very precise fret job using a minimal amount of tools. This is how I learned to do fretwork 30 years ago, and although my fretwork has evolved a lot since then, I still use this basic approach in a lot of circumstances. So let's get these old frets out. We're going to remove this old nut and it's probably not going to be at the right height for our new fret, so we'll replace this with a bone nut. We're going to get our tape from level one back out here and tape up the danger areas of this guitar to make sure we don't bump anything with our levelers or files.
My favorite tool for pulling frets is the Precision Fret Puller. We've had a lot of different versions of this tool through the years, this is hands down my favorite. The face is ground smooth and flat with 45-degree jaws that are meant to just carefully wedge between the fingerboard and the fret to lift them up out of the slot. Now these look like cutters, but don't cut fretwire with these. The jaws are not quite the same, they're not going to stand up to that. Keep a separate set of pullers and a separate set of cutters.
All right, let's get started on the first fret, I always keep the soldering iron on because heat really helps to vaporize any glue or debris that might be holding this fret up. A hot fret will come out easier, and I like to use some solder. Not everybody agrees with this method, but for me, using solder spreads the heat faster and the fret doesn't immediately begin to cool as soon as I take the soldering iron away. The solder helps to keep the fret hot longer. Just don't overdo it. You can get these too hot and scorch the board. It only takes a few seconds with solder, you're going to see what I mean.
Now I'm going to come right on the edge and the idea here isn't to pull this fret out of the slot yet, but right now I just want to get under the fret there. I've just barely got the edge of my pullers right under the corner here, and I can move slow because this solder is going to keep this fret nice and hot. I'm not trying to close these, I'm just getting them close, just kind of working them toward one another, and then that angle cut on these jaws is going to jack the fret up out of the slot. And the second I feel like the fret is fighting me and it's not allowing these pullers to come together, I'm going to back up and then move forward again. Basically, by the time I get to the base side, I want this fret to just fall out. That's nice and clean, so we'll move on and we'll do the next one.
[Gene removes the rest of the frets using the same method]
The other thing I'm watching too, is to not touch any of these dots with my soldering iron or any solder. They're celluloid so they're delicate and they will melt. You'll have to practice keeping these pullers flushed to the board so that we're not digging in with either of the corners. We're flat and smooth all the way across the width of this board. Okay, great. No chips, no dents, no scratches. We didn't create anything else that we need to clean up here. This board looks beautiful. We're going to move on.
Leveling the Fretboard
Now let's turn our attention to leveling the fretboard surface itself. Now, you can use a dedicated Fretboard Leveler like this one we carry, but our under string leveler works great for this too, and it still gives you the option for working under the strings when you're leveling the frets. So as an essential tool, I prefer this one and we'll use it today.
We have a beautiful old Brazilian Rosewood fretboard here, that makes it easier on us. If you've got Maple, you've also got a finished fretboard in most cases, if you're just starting out, stick to unfinished fretboards until you master some fretwork and then get into the more complicated jobs where finish work is involved. So just like how we did on our fret level to level the board itself, the first job is to take my truss rod wrench and adjust this truss rod to find the straightest point of this neck. And again, we're going to do this in the playing position. Last time I just propped the neck up on a neck rest and that's fine, but let me show you another cool way to do it, and there we have it. Both hands free and the guitar basically in the playing position.
So now I've got both hands free to straighten this neck, so I'm going to bring a light back in here and help illuminate the gaps and I still use my notched straight edge because I don't want any of the gunk or debris that build up around these frets to throw off my reading. I'll check the bass side, the treble side, and somewhere down the center. And what I'm seeing here is an even back-bow in all of these spots, which is what I expected because this neck is still adjusted for the pole of the string tension. What I want to recreate here is what the neck looked like with the strings on, which is to say it had a slight up-bow, not this back-bow we're seeing now because it doesn't have tension. So I need to loosen this rod, lefty loosie, to relieve the neck a little and allow it to straighten out.
So it's looking pretty much how I remember it. You can get a .005" feeler gauge to drag through between the sixth and seventh fret on the bass. I'm going to call this my straightest point and we're going to get leveling from here. Okay, guitar back in the working position [Gene lays the guitar down flat on his workbench]. Check this out. I'm going to take this white pencil and color this board in [Gene quickly fills in the fretboard with back and forth white pencil marks]. I'm going to take my leveler and some 120-grit sandpaper. This white is just going to show us our high spots real fast. Just give us a quick overview [Gene slowly works the leveler back and forth down the fretboard]. We'll clean this board up a little bit and everything that we just checked with the straight edge in the light should jump out at us a little bit more here. It turns out we really didn't need that white pencil. The patina change really shows us what's going on. We were touching down here at the end of the neck and we were touching here around the first, second fret area and we have what appears to be a big gap right here. So hitting the entire board as one whole unit, just kind of quickly reveals what's hanging me up here and here [Gene points to the top and bottom of the fretboard].
Now I want to use some shorter straight edges to determine which one of these two places is worse. I'm going to concentrate, find my higher spots, until I zero in and know that I can hit this whole board as one unit and I'm not going to be removing material from places that don't necessarily need it. I'm not trying to get perfect yet, I'm just trying to zero in. Still a pretty significant gap through there. You always want to be aware of how much material you're removing from side to side and from start to finish. We want to try to keep it as uniform as possible, so I use a caliper and I measure from the glue joint to the top of the fretboard, just a rough idea, and I compare that to various spots around the board and we're looking pretty good. Let's put it back in the working position and continue on with the same thing we were doing a little bit more.
I'm actually going to move this, if I keep it on the fret rest right here, I'm kind of creating a bend right here. It's not as big of a deal when I'm hitting the whole length of the board, but while I'm concentrating on the tongue, I'm just going to set it completely on its back on the bench and let the neck hang off the side. That way I'm not creating any stress points in this neck while I flatten it out a little bit. I'm keeping my hand to the back of this leveler because I know the bulk of the material is still at the end of the neck. So I'm going to hold towards the back and still concentrate on this area and then the extra length is going to help. You can already see the scratches, it's going to help blend us in with the rest of this. Still seeing our gap through here, but I think our window is starting to close, so we have a little more work to do [Gene continues to work the leveler on the fretboard and vacuums up his dust]. All right, let's check this out again, just see how we're doing. Okay, that looks great. We are really close here.
So now it's time to transition to using a Radius Block. So I already know that this is a 10-inch, we checked it earlier. So we're going to use this radius block to not only true up the radius side to side, but also we're going to use it to finish our leveling process. I'm going to stick with 120-grit, but we'll get the wide paper out. You'll notice too, my body positioning for all of this is still keeping everything in a straight line, my arm, moving in the direction of the neck. Always pay attention to how you're standing, that you're not straining or you're uncomfortable. I want long, straight, accurate lines.
All right, let's see how we're doing here. You can clearly see the shiny spots here I haven't hit yet, but everywhere else I'm looking pretty good, so we need to figure out what's going on, why we're not hitting this, why we're not blending it into the rest. I'm going to check this with light, but I'm also going to check it with a .003" feeler gauge. That's a tolerance I can live with on a guitar like this. If I check from the end of the fretboard back past the 12th, 11th fret and I look at that gap, yeah, I can't get a .003" in here. I think what I'm going to do is hit this one more time with the radius block and whatever's left at that point, I'm just going to let go and if it's showing in the tops of the frets, we'll take it out of there and everything will be good.
Installing New Frets
Okay, I think we're ready to move on to the next stage here. Our board is level, radiused, and the final step before we install new frets is to come in here and clean out all of these slots. We've got old glue and sanding debris, compacted dust. We don't want any of this interfering with the fret seating completely flush to the board. So I'm going to put some Naphtha on this board and work it into these slots and kind of let it soak in and loosen up all of this oil and debris.
Okay, let's talk about the tool we're going to use to clean this out. There are a lot of great tools you can use for this job and everybody has their favorite, but mine is this Japanese-style Fret Slot Cleaning Saw. It's the right width to fit in pretty much any fret slot you're going to encounter. It has two sides, one that cuts on the pull and one that cuts on the push. It's very sharp and it's really good at going in there and digging out anything that's lodged in the bottom of that slot. And it also has the added bonus that if we need to deepen these slots a little bit because we did remove some material off of the top, which shortens the height of that slot. We can also do that at the same time.
How do you know if your fret slots are deep enough? Well, we sell a gauge for that. This Fret Slot Depth Gauge, that's really handy. To use it, you just check the flat side against the wire you're going to use and see what line touches. So we're hitting the first line there, that's plenty of depth for this tang. So then we'll rotate to the side that has a radius in it, 10-inch, and make sure that that first line is at least buried inside the slot. So there's more than enough depth.
But let me show you how to make one for free, it works pretty well. I'm going to take a piece of fretwire that's radiused, and I'm going to take my nippers and cut a notch in it right here. Okay, and then I'm going to grab it, pass that notch, and I'm going to bend a right angle into it just like that. Then I'm going to take a file and just clean these fret tangs off so that we can slip this tang in and out of the slot nice and easy. Okay, so we've cleaned this off so it goes into the slot. That little chunk of wire has our radius on it and we can just put it down in the slot and make sure that it bottoms out and presses all the way down. No problem. We can even look at it along the edge and see how far we are from touching the bottom. But if you do a lot of fretwork, this is real handy, but if you don't do fretwork that often, this works great.
So now we have a good way to check our slot depth, let's get in here and clean these all out. You don't want to skimp on this step. Really make sure these are clean because any sort of debris in this slot is going to cause you major problems later on. Checking the depth a little more here towards the end because this is where I took off the most material. So if there was going to be a slot that isn't deep enough, it's probably going to be down here where I concentrated most of my efforts. Okay, these are nice and clean and they're at full depth. I'm going to rinse this off one more time with Naphtha just to make sure we have all the dust and everything off of it.
We're ready to install some frets. My board looks great, it's nice and flat. This little low spot is almost completely gone. I've got my #0152 Pre-cut, pre-radiused fretwire here. This is going to save us the cost of an expensive FretBender, but if you do a lot of fretwork, a FretBender is a pretty good investment. It'll allow you to buy bulk fretwire in long straight pieces, and then you can run it through here and radius it to any radius you want. If you're just beginning or you don't do a lot of fretwork, you have a couple of guitars you want to do, this is a great option.
So this wire comes in several radii. You don't have to be too caught up on matching perfectly. Just get one that is a tighter radius, a smaller radius than what you're working with. So this is 10", the closest we have is either 7-1/4" or 12". I'm going with the seven and a quarter, and let me show you why. It's a little over radiused, which means it's going to be tighter on the ends and there's going to be a little gap in the center. That's going to help keep our ends down. It's going to over radius it, and the excess pressure will be on our ends, and that's going to work to our advantage.
Now, when it comes to the actual installation of the fret into the slot, there are a lot of different ways to do it. If you have a drill press, a Fret Press Caul is a good option. You can press frets in pretty easily with that. A dedicated Fret Arbor Press is a great option, if you do a lot of fretting, you can install one permanently or just clamp it to your bench. Personally, I love to use the regular jaws and the jaws to fret presses in conjunction. It gives me a lot of flexibility, it's become my go-to way of fretting. If you get into fretwork more seriously, it's really worth investing in fret pressing tools. But what I'm going to show you today is how to install frets exclusively with the Fret Hammer. This is how I learned to do fretwork 30 years ago, and I still do fretwork this way today. And even when I'm using my pressing tools, I'm still using a fret hammer. So using a fret hammer to install frets is a necessary skill in my book.
So the obvious question is, can I just use a regular hammer? And you can, and my very first fretting hammer was a regular hammer, but I don't recommend it. A hammer is made of hardened steel, which is way too hard for the material that fretwire is made out of, you're going to dent your wire too easily. A hammer specifically for fretwire is going to have two surfaces that are safe for fretwire. Ours will have brass and plastic, both work great.
So let's install some frets. Now, this to me, is probably the most critical step of your entire fret job. If you don't get your frets fit and seated correctly, when you go to level them, you're going to have a lot more work to do. On the other hand, if you go slow and you focus and you ensure that each fret is fully seated in the slot and secure, you're going to have very little leveling to do and that's going to save you time and you're going to get a better looking, better playing fret job in the end. The secret to your success here is how the width of this slot matches the width of your tang, and how this first fret goes in is going to dictate our approach for the rest of them.
Okay, we need a nice hard solid surface here. So I've got a neck rest under here and I'm going to pull this green pad out of here so we have a good place to hammer. Let's see how this fret fits [Gene sets the fret into the slot and starts to hammer it down]. So when I hammer a fret, I start on the ends and I get them going first until the fret wants to guide into the slot. I'm pretty happy with how that went in. It felt really good, it's nice and solid in there. And pretty common, what you'll find is that the ends don't want to stay down. See the springiness we have here? That's normal and I'm going to show you how to glue those down. The first thing I'm going to do is put a little bit of paste wax around both sides of this fret. You're going to notice I have a lot of excess fret here, and that's fine. That's actually going to work in our advantage at this point because it's going to give me leverage to really push that in down. And remember the notch in our hammer? We're still going to use that to glue these ends down.
For this, I'm going to use #10 liquid Super Glue. It's water-thin, it's going to wick right where we need it, and we're going to use some Accelerator to make it dry instantly. Now I'm going to use the brush on stuff because I don't want to be spraying accelerator into slots that I'm not ready to glue yet. It's going to make these dry faster than I want. So we're going to use just a little bit of brush on accelerator. I like to do one end at a time here, just a couple of drops [Gene applies a couple of drops against the edge of the fret using a Whip Tip on the glue bottle]. We don't need a lot. Wipe off the excess and we're going to push this fret down, and then I like to flex it a little bit [Gene presses down on both ends of the fret]. It's going to kind of help suction that glue into place. Now once we hit it with accelerator, we need to move kind of quick here. So I'll get in place, brush it on, push it down, and we're going to wait about 15, 20 seconds maybe. I'm going to watch it closely, if I go to let pressure up and I see that glue move, it's not hard, it's still liquid and I need to hurry up and press it back down before it dries.
If something goes wrong in this stage, it's not a big deal. We already learned how to pull frets, so we just repeat that process, pull the fret out, and do it again. If you're learning fretwork, get used to that idea because you're going to end up doing it at some point. I don't see any movement. That looks great. Let's do the other side. You can just see that glue go right where we want it. Perfect. All right, that should be long enough. All right, those look good. Nice and solid.
Next, I'm going to cut this excess length off. I don't need it anymore. I don't want it building up, going down the neck and cutting me and getting in the way and for the same reason we kept it to begin with, to give us some leverage holding it down, we don't want it now giving us leverage to pop it back up if we bump it or hit it on something. So let's cut these flush, and for that, you need a Fret Cutter. These are specially ground, sharpened, and hardened to be able to cut right up next to the fretboard. You can find flush cutters at a hardware store, but the problem with those is they are ground so that there's still an angle to the edge. That doesn't allow you to get right up next to the side of the fretboard. You're still going to have a lot of excess material to file away.
So you want to be careful when you cut these that you don't break this glue joint. Let me show you how I do it. I like to cut my frets up and down like this. If I cut them like this, it tends to take the top of the fret and curl it under you end up with kind of a mushy-looking fret end that's harder to clean up and make right. If I cut them like this [Gene is holding the Fret Cutters so the handles are facing up and down], I get really clean right angles and that nice T-shape that I'm looking for on the end. I'm going to rest my thumb on the front of these because as I chop through this fret, I want a little weight pushing down into the board. That's going to ensure that we don't shock this glue joint and break it loose. So I'm going to put a little weight here [Gene places his thumb on top of the fret cutter], make sure I'm parallel to the fret fretboard and one quick motion [Gene cuts the fret], and that looks great. Still solid, you can see there's no movement there, and we'll do the same thing to this side. All right, that looks great. I'm really happy with how that first fret went in. Let's repeat that process and get through this fret job.
[Gene installs the rest of the frets using the same process]
Okay, folks, there we have it, 22 new frets. It went beautifully, I didn't have any major issues along the way. So let's take a moment now to clean up a little bit of glue that's on the frets and on the fretboard. If you did everything correctly, you really shouldn't need much more than the last essential tool I'm going to recommend to you, the humble razor blade. This thing is handy for just about everything. I use it to apply glue, to scrape finish, and even to just clean off glue from a new fret job. Let me show you. This is what I mean. You've got a little bit of shiny glue here, just a little line. It's not super noticeable, but as we polish the fret out, that'll get shinier too and it'll kind of jump out. So take the time to clean all of this stuff up and your frets will look a lot better.
Finishing Touches
Once we get all of our excess glue off of this board, we are back to using the knowledge we gained in level one and level two to finish this fret job out. We need to level, touch this up with the radius block, and then crown all the tops of our frets. We'll clean up the sharp fret ends and then bevel them with our beveling file, and then dress the ends out with our fret end file. Finally, we give everything a polish with our Micro-Mesh Touch Up Sticks and buff them out with some Flitz Metal Polish. And we're all set, we're done with this fret job. So those are my essential fretting tools, the ones I can't work without, along with a glimpse at a fretting technique that I learned decades ago. Even though my fretting has changed and grown a lot over the years, I still use these same tools, I've just added to them.
So this was just a taste, and if it's left you hungry for more, don't fret because we're going to be doing a deep dive into all things fretwork coming soon. So check back and we'll see you at the bench next time.
