Guitar Repair

Guitar Repair: fret job on a 1970s Gibson Heritage

There is a lot of satisfaction to be gained from an excellent fret job – both for the player, and the luthier. It is always a pleasure to work upon an instrument that is evidently well-played and well-loved. At the Jim Fleeting Guitars workshop, partial and complete refrets are a staple of our day-to-day repair work.  Some of our customers are (pleasantly!) surprised when they discover how much work goes into a good refret. Here’s a step-by-step guide, with a 1970s Gibson Heritage.

The guitar sounded amazing – and clearly, I wasn’t the only one who thought so. All the frets were worn, and heavy wear had made it impossible to fret chords on the first three frets. A complete refret was required.

My first job was to take out all the frets. This was done by heating each fret with a 100 watt soldering iron. The heat disintegrated the glue holding the frets in. The soldering iron was followed by a pair of “fret pullers” – really, a small pair of flush cutters. I gently squeezed each fret, and pulled it out. This is always a delicate task, which demands a strong and steady hand. Much care must be taken not to crack the fingerboard, and the fret should be well heated.

When all the old, worn frets were removed, I sized and cut new frets from a coiled length of fret wire. The new frets were bent to a smaller radius than the fret board; an overbend that ensured the ends of the frets stayed down once they were in place.

This is the Jim Fleeting Guitars Fret-a-Tron©: as useful as it is unsophisticated.  Each slot is marked with the number of the fret. It ensures that the various lengths of wire do not get mixed up, and that the the correct length is hammered into each slot.

Because the Gibson Heritage has binding running down each side of the fretboard, I trimmed the tang - the part of the fret that fits in the slot of the fretboard – so it didn’t go to the end of each fret. I also sanded the fretboard so that it was level.

Now that the frets were all the correct size and shape, it was time to hammer them into the slots.

I dabbed very thin superglue onto each fret, so that the glue wicked under the fret and along the slot. Then I hammered and clamped each fret. When clamping I used a thin piece of wood, positioning it between frets. The clamp pushed the frets in the fretboard down and out. This helped the ends to stay in. Once the glue had dried, the ends were trimmed using the flush cutters.

Then I shaped the ends of the frets using a file, so that the end of each fret was 45 degrees to the fingerboard.

Now that the frets were in, they had to be levelled, crowned and polished. First, I made the frets level with one another. To do this I used a piece of glass with sandpaper glued to it  to ensure that  the sanding surface was as flat as possible.

The levelling process leaves the frets flat at the top; from a side view, they are trapezia. Frets should appear semi-circular from the side, so must be crowned. This is achieved with a crowning file: a file with a concave edge, used to carve and round the top of a fret. To ensure that the height of each fret remained unchanged, I drew a line across the top of the fret with a felt-tip marker. The fret should be crowned until this ink line is so thin, it is almost disappearing. In this way the fret was rounded, but the very top was untouched.

The final process was the polish. The frets were now covered in scratches from the levelling and crowning processes, and I polished every single scratch from every single fret. I also rounded off and polished the ends, so that there were no sharp corners to catch the player’s hand.

The final stage: I cleaned the fingerboard, to remove all the tiny pieces of fret (some of which you can see in the picture above). I use lemon oil for this. Not only does it do an excellent job of cleaning and protecting my customers’ fingerboards, it also gives their guitars a pleasant smell.

The end result: