Fret Jobs & Fret Polishing

A poor re-fret can damage or ruin your guitar. The extra work involved in repairing the damage done by poor re-fret work is considerable. Ed Roman's price for re-fret work reflects the time and care needed to do an exceptional job. You should take this in to consideration when comparing quotes.
 
The steps involved when we do a re-fret job are described below.

The guitar is inspected to ensure that it will benefit from a re-fret. Many times It may only need a fret dress or a set-up.

The type of fret wire required is then decided on with you involved in the decision.  Fret wire is available in a variety of heights, thicknesses and profiles and should be chosen to match your playing style. When a customer does not require a certain size.  Ed Roman will use the closest thing available to original.

The strings are then removed and sometimes the neck will be removed from the guitar. If the neck cannot be removed, then the body of the guitar will be masked and protected before work commences

Next the old frets are removed. This has to be done with great care to avoid damage to the fingerboard. It varies in difficulty from very hard to nearly impossible. Tom Anderson Guitars & Warwick Basses are  two examples of extremely hard to remove frets.

The fret slots will then need to be cleaned and, depending on condition, they may need to repaired or rebuilt. Sometimes the fret slots are in the wrong place,  We find this alot on Heritage guitars, Original Zemaitis, and many new Gibson's & Epiphones.  When we encounter fret slots in the wrong place we will fill the old slot and replace with a new fret.

The neck will be placed in custom jig to hold it safely and firmly for the re-fretting work.  (sometimes we do fret jobs under pressure)

The fret wire is put into a machine designed to bend it to the correct radius after which it is cut into suitable lengths.

The frets are then placed in the slots and pressed or hammered to a firm fit. 

At this stage the guitar as set aside for a few days to allow the frets to set in.

The frets are trimmed and the ends filed flush with the finger board. The fret ends are then sealed.

The final stage in the process is to perform a fret dress. 

Too often guitars are re-fretted, when a fret dress would make more sense. Worn frets often look worse than they really are, as the fret tends to spread out sideways rather than wear away.

It’s not only well used guitars that can benefit from a fret dress. Often, brand new guitars can have poorly finished or uneven frets.  (Extremely common for us to do a fret redress on many new guitars)

A fret dress can also be used to correct minor defects in a guitar neck that might otherwise be prohibitively expensive to put right.

A selective fret dressing can, to some extent, compensate for a neck that has a slight twist or ‘S’ bend.

The procedure for a fret dress is typically as follows.

Check the guitar as a whole and the frets in particular, taking measurements for later use.

The old strings are removed and if possible the neck is removed from the guitar. On a set neck guitar the pickups and body would be carefully masked before any work is done and on maple finger boards the entire neck is masked such that only the frets are visible.

Each fret will be examined and any that are loose will be reseated. The truss rod will be reset with reference to a precision straight edge, which can take some time on twisted necks.

The frets are then filed using a special single cut file. Progress is constantly checked against the straight edge.

The frets are then profiled using a diamond particle file. This is the most time consuming part of the job.

Once the desired profile has been achieved on all the frets, the fret ends are dressed. This can be awkward on bound necks such as Gibson. The trick here is to mimic the fret shape by filing the binding itself.

The next step is to polish the frets with progressively finer abrasive paper, finishing with 1200 grit and fine wire wool

The final step is to unmask and clean the finger board and follow up with a full set-up.