"HOW TO" fret leveling
Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2009 5:53 pm
i think this is the third time i have done one of these, but i always get questions about it anyway.
so.
this is a 57 tele neck that was re-fretted sometime in the late 80's early 90's and it has been played really heavily since then.
as you can tell the frets are all pretty worn, but they are evenly worn so it won't be that big of a deal to knock em down.
first thing, color those frets!
by coloring them it makes it apparent while leveling them which ones are low/ where the most wear on the fretboard is.
and some more....
once i get them all knocked down i go over the whole thing with a radius block, i did this becuz it was a refret and the radius was somewhere between a 9.5 and an 11 or something odd like that.
and yes thats a 7.25 radii block.
after that i start to re-crown them.
here is a pick of one fret crowned and polished, one crowned, and one leveled, all in a row so you can see the slight differences.
if you look, you can see there is still a big guage out of one of the frets, that will go away with the re-crowning and polishing later one.
and essentially this is the finished product, still needs a bit of polish work, but it looks 100X better and he won't be choking out the strings like he was before.
questions anyone?
(when i originally wrote this up a few days ago it was LONG! but very in depth, i figured this will be a good enough example to follow on, but practice with a bad neck first, and not a 57 tele neck, and please, please PLEASE, ask me a question if you want to try it, but are weary, mezz followed the first thread i made about it, asked me a couple of q's and then tried it on his mando and said it worked wonders.)
so.
this is a 57 tele neck that was re-fretted sometime in the late 80's early 90's and it has been played really heavily since then.
as you can tell the frets are all pretty worn, but they are evenly worn so it won't be that big of a deal to knock em down.
first thing, color those frets!
by coloring them it makes it apparent while leveling them which ones are low/ where the most wear on the fretboard is.
and some more....
once i get them all knocked down i go over the whole thing with a radius block, i did this becuz it was a refret and the radius was somewhere between a 9.5 and an 11 or something odd like that.
and yes thats a 7.25 radii block.
after that i start to re-crown them.
here is a pick of one fret crowned and polished, one crowned, and one leveled, all in a row so you can see the slight differences.
if you look, you can see there is still a big guage out of one of the frets, that will go away with the re-crowning and polishing later one.
and essentially this is the finished product, still needs a bit of polish work, but it looks 100X better and he won't be choking out the strings like he was before.
questions anyone?
(when i originally wrote this up a few days ago it was LONG! but very in depth, i figured this will be a good enough example to follow on, but practice with a bad neck first, and not a 57 tele neck, and please, please PLEASE, ask me a question if you want to try it, but are weary, mezz followed the first thread i made about it, asked me a couple of q's and then tried it on his mando and said it worked wonders.)