Time to prep and install the frets! But first, let’s admire that headstock one more time… I’ve been applying a gunstock oil called “Tru Oil” to it and the rest of the neck, aside from the fretboard itself. Looking smooth, and another nice thing about Tru Oil is it isn’t sticky (once cured, that is). So the back of the neck is silky, which makes for a great playing feel. Later, I’ll need to add the logo (I’m excited as to how that’s been coming along, so stand by), add the nut, truss rod cover, drill the tuner holes, install the tuners. Will this build EVER end?
Ah well, hobbies are supposed to be fun. And first off on the frets is not so much. After all of the shaping, sanding and binding, the existing fret slots are almost hopelessly filled with wood and plastic dust. Luckily, it’s a sunny evening, so I sits myself down with a beer and needle and patiently clean out every slot…
This is a little tricky as I don’t want the fret slots to extend out to the edge past the binding; hiding the fret tangs make the neck look nicer when done. So while I can’t just use a fret or nut saw to clean out the entire channel, I can use a fret saw to assist where things were too mucked up for a needle – I must have broken four or five of ‘em during cleanup.
All cleaned up, the neck is now ready for frets. But are the frets ready for the neck? Alas, no. I have pre-cut and radiused frets from USA supplier StewMac…
These save me the slight hassle of bending the wire to the same 12” radius that the fretboard has been lovingly sanded to, but they still need to be cut to width, which presents two challenges:
- The neck is tapered, so each fret need to be slightly wider than the last one. Or shorter. Depending on which end of the neck you start at.
- The aforementioned un-slotted binding on each side of the neck means that the tang (the part of the fret that sticks down into the neck to hold the fret in place) must be cut away so everything looks nice.
There are 21 frets on this neck, with two edges on each, so 42 fret tangs need to be cut out. I could do this by hand, carefully snipping, grinding and/or filing the tangs away, never to be seen again (tangs for the memories). Or, I could pay StewMac outrageous amounts of $$ for a tang snipping tool (around $70USD fyi), or dyi it myself. It turns out the StewMac tool is a modified sheet metal nibbler – a little YouTubing teaches me that I can get one of these for about 20CDN on Amazon and modify it myself.
And so I do. The nibbler is kinda just what it sounds like – a tool that bites out little bits of metal. It’s meant to chomp out lines through tin or other sheet metal, but why not fret tangs? Well, because frets and their tangs are not flat. So one must file or grind a slot in the nibbler for the fret to sit in so you can cleanly chomp off the tang. I try filing a slot in the nibbler’s main plate, but this cheap Chinese tool is made of pretty hardy stuff, so I switch to a cutting wheel on the Dremel, which goes much faster and makes pretty sparks.
Yes, it looks like the extension cord (which happens to be powering the Dremel) is in danger of being sliced through, but it is actual safely in the background. So, nibbler modified, I slice off a bit of tang from one end of a fret:
The modified nibbler works great; only a couple of passes with a file cleans it up. So from there, just line the fret up on its intended slot, cut to just-over-length (ultimately everything will be filed to a nice edge), then nibble out the other side’s tang and clean that one up with the file.
If you aren’t sure what that cutaway is for, here it is on the neck…should make things a little more obvious.
All done, the fret goes into a high-tech fret-keeper to let me know which one goes in which slot.
One down, twenty to go! And twenty frets later…
Now it’s hammer time! Frets can be put in with fancy fret presses that squeeze them into the slots, or more traditionally hammered in. One is supposed to use a proper fret hammer for this, made of brass, nylon or something softer than the fret material itself. I go with my old ball peen metalworking hammer. To protect the frets from damage I shield them with an old credit card. I start at the body end – not being a guitar shredder, I won’t use these frets as often as the ones up at the business end of the neck, so hopefully I’ll gain skill as I go along…
It’s a careful slog up the fretboard, hammering them carefully, but firmly into place…
And eventually the frets are all in!
That’s enough for today, even though there is much to still do. Fret ends must be trimmed, all frets need to be checked to see that they are all holding, the fretboard gets a light waxing and the frets get CA glued into place (especially the ends, as they don’t have tangs holding them down). Frets get leveled so that they are perfectly in line with each other, then each one gets a crown filed onto it (nice round top after the leveling) and the ends get beveled…
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