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The Job - This is a fine-looking used Fender® Japan Telecaster a client brought in.
There was pretty heavy fret wear at the lower few frets, so we decided to refret instead of redressing. |
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| You can see very deep grooves into the fret wire all the way to the fifth/ sixth position. We decided to refret the first seven frets. |
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| The strings are removed and neck separated from the body. The neck is then placed on a Stewart-MacDonald® neck support caul. |
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The fretboard needs to be heavily masked to protect it from scratches and potential dings that may occur when working with the fret puller.
Lots of care needs to be taken at this point as you need quite a bit of force to pull the frets out but you have to be gentle at the same time. |
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| All seven old frets are out and on the table. Lot of algae and grime have built up in the crevices. |
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The frets slots are all cleared up. We recommend full refrets over partials is because fret slots widen slightly with every refret.
Therefore repeated partial refrets will result in two different set of fret slots, one becoming wider than the other. |
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| Replacement frets cut to fit, lined up and ready for fretting. |
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| Hammering in the frets. |
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| Leveling of the fret edges. The ends will be dressed later. For now we'll just follow the profile of the existing frets to create a more uniform feel and look. |
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| Dressing the fret ends with a needle file (yes you guessed it.. from Stewart-MacDonald®) so there will be no sharp edges after! |
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Although not shown, the neck was first measured with a notched straightedge for straightness and its truss rod was adjusted prior to leveling.
The frets were then levelled with a fingerboard leveling file as shown above. |
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| Crowning the leveled frets. |
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| The crowned frets look rather dull and scratched but don't worry, we'll take care of them in the next few steps! |
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| The crowning file really left its mark on the frets. To remove the scratches, we started off with coarse sand paper. |
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| The frets are looking slightly better but a few more passes with finer sand paper is required. |
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| Final step; polishing with "000" fine steel wool for that winning shine! |
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| Shiny new frets all done up. The guitar is now ready for restringing and set-up. |
