I was honoured when, almost a year ago, Gordon asked me to contribute to the planned exhibition. I thought I’d make something special for it, and at the time I was receiving a lot of press for building the UK’s first nine string bass. Few luthiers in the UK are making “ERBs” or Extended Range Basses, so I decided to build a second nine string, with a relatively modest 24 frets.  My first nine string had 36!

I began with this large chunk of Californian Redwood, which I bought from a guy on the side of the road during a road trip through Humboldt County in northern California.  It became the top of the through neck bass, and the back of the wings.

I also had some pieces of buckeye left over from a previous build.  I used these to make the pickup cover, rear headcap and the chevrons on the rear of the centre block.

In total, I glued 145 pieces of wood together to make this bass.  The species included bubinga, wenge, buckeye, redwood, zebrano and mahogany. It has had good feedback from those who have seen it, which is pleasing.

This is how it looks in the exhibition:

Gordon Giltrap describes the exhibited guitars as “works of art as well as beautiful things to play”, and on opening night I understood what he meant. My fellow exhibitors, who include Andy Manson, Martyn Booth and Roger Bucknall, are all fine craftsmen. Standing in the middle of the large white gallery, looking at the beautifully-worked instruments that line the walls, gave me goosebumps.

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: