Fretting

The fboard has now been levelled along its length and cambered across its width. The fretwire I am using is straight. This needs to be radiused a bit tighter than the fboard camber so that the frets will sit properly when they are hammered in. Bending the fretwire by hand will probably result in very uneven twisted frets so another gadget needs to be thrown together.



The fret bender is a board with three ball bearing races on it. The fretwire is drawn back and forth whilst applying pressure to the third bearing mounted on a bracket. It did the job OK and all three lengths were ready for fitting.

Before the frets were slapped in, I had to get the width of the neck wood to match the width of the fboard. It was originally left oversize so that the placement of the fboard on the neck wasn't too critical, but now that is fixed the excess material can be removed. I used a small 7" jack plane to remove most of the Padauk and finished off with coarse sandpaper. The back of the neck will be shaped later, but it is good to start getting the neck close to its finished size.

The newly uncovered wood is quite brightly coloured and shows how some of the previously exposed Padauk has aged over the last few months. The picture also shows that the small fret marker dots have almost disappeared, but the ghost and pacman are reasonably visible.



A practice fret was bashed in an offcut of the neck wood and seemed to go in without breaking or splitting the wood.

The first fret went in at the body end. I don't tend to play much at that end of the guitar so if the first few are a bit lumpy it won't be too serious. The technique outlined in Melvyn Hiscocks book was used - ie cut oversized, tap the ends in first, followed by the middle, and this seemed to work fine.

After a few frets it became apparent that the camber on the fboard was not as uniform as it should be. The edges had a little too much taken off, giving a change of radius. This resulted in the frets sitting down nicely over the central three-quarters, but the very ends were slightly proud. More tapping, bashing, thumping, & drifting did not make this any better and re shaping the frets to include a change of radius sounds difficult, time consuming and will probably result in an instrument that feels wrong, so they were left alone.

After all the frets were fitted, the ends were trimmed with a Dremel with a small grinding wheel. Some of the fboard gap filler (PVA/paint) was used to fill the visible ends of the fret slots top and bottom. The slightly proud frets were treated to some superglue to ensure they remain in their position and do not relax or fall out at a later stage.

The zero fret was not fitted at this stage as the frets still need to be levelled or dressed. This needs to be slightly higher than the others so it needs to be hammered in after the levelling has been done.