#1-Fretwork — tyson hand-did

Fretwork | The neck is in its roughed out form and attachable. Time to install, level, and recrown the frets. I have had a lot of questions about this process. Needless to say, if the frets are done wrong, pretty much all is lost. Since I have done quite a bit of fretwork on my other guitars, I had some basic knowledge of what I needed to do. However, I have never installed frets and set them up from scratch. This turned out to be one of the most trouble free aspects of the build and very satisfying. When you see those frets going in, that chunk of mahogany and rosewood is transformed into a guitar neck.

In reality, this process is tedious and kind of boring. But for the sake of documentation, I will post a few pics and a little 'splaining for anyone interested in the big picture of this process.

Fretwire has two basic parts: the head that sits above the fretboard and makes contact with the string and the tang which is the barbed protrusion on the underside, hammered into the fretboard, holding the fret in place. I had not planned for my fretwork to be all that fancy (just shooting for functional), so all I needed to do was slightly bend the straight fret wire, cut it to the appropriate length for each fret slot, and hammer it in.

After all the frets are in, I go back with a pair of flush cut snippers and clip the ends of the frets even to the fingerboard.

Next, a bevel is filed along the ends of the frets to smooth them off and make them comfortable when moving your hand up and down the neck. After checking to make sure everything is seated well, a small bead of thin viscosity CA glue (superglue) is applied along one edge which then wicks into the fretslot. This adds a little more strength to the hold of the frets. Also if any frets try to pull up on the ends, they can be glued down. I only had a couple that did that.

Once all the frets are in and they are basically level, you have to precisely level the frets so that they are all the same height. This is done with a straight sanding block or file attached to a block.

I mark each fret with a black sharpie line. Once all the lines are sanded away, I know the frets are level.

I use a tool called the FretGuru when leveling frets. It is just a perfectly flat 18" long rectangular piece of aluminum that has sandpaper attached to one side. The tool is slid back and forth along the length of the fretboard truing the tops of the frets to its flat surface. The FretGuru is a handy tool that I use for other shaping and flattening purposes as well

You can see some black lines are still there. That line along the frets has to be worked down the fretboard until all the black is gone. You can also see the metal shavings on the fingerboard.

Once the frets are all leveled, they have to be re-crowned. The tops of the frets are now flat and they need to be rounded so that the string makes contact in the center of the fret (the break point). If the frets are not re-crowned, intonation problems will occur as the strings will not be contacting a consistent break angle.

I forgot to take pictures of this process. There are all kinds of fancy tools you can buy for this; I just used a three corner file and did it by sight. Again, I marked the tops of the frets with a Sharpie then filed the edges over until there was just a thin black line left in the middle of the fret.

When I finish the guitar and dial everything in, I will come back and polish the frets with 2000 grit sand paper. I am starting to get anxious. Only days away from stringing this baby up and seeing what it sounds like. Or what it sounds like when it implodes.