Strat Copy - Partial Fret Dress

Yes, it's another Strat copy; this time from a jamming studio. Notes played on the 18th fret upwards were dead, ie all you could hear was just a dull 'thunk.' Neck relief was spot on, so that wasn't the problem. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the fretboard had no 'fall-away' built in, and as such; the upper frets were making contact with the strings whenever you fretted above the 17th.

The obvious solution was to dress the offending frets and create a fall-away. This was done from the 15th fret upwards, to smoothly blend in the fall-away with the rest of the frets. After the fretboard was straightened, the frets were leveled with a leveling beam and then re-crowned and polished in the usual manner. I'm glad to say that this partial fret dress took care of the dead note problem.

The other issue was with the output jack socket. Plugged in, output was weak and intermittent. The jack socket itself was loose, even after tightening the hex nut. Everything looked nice and shiny on the outside, but it was a different story once I removed the jack plate. The output jack was totally rusted and was in danger of disintegrating. So into the bin went the old rusty socket, to be replaced with a Neutrik/Rean NYS229. That's about it for this post. Thanks for dropping by, and have a nice day :)

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