YouTube Videos
Part Two: Fretwork
We'll start off with the cracked rosewood fretboard of the GA141, methinks. The crack was quite deep, so I filled it layer by layer with a mixture of rosewood dust and super glue. Once the hardened mixture had built up to a sufficient height, scrapers and abrasive paper were used to level and smoothen out the filled area. And, as you can see in the pictures below, the repair ended up being hardly noticeable.
On to fretwork then, more specifically; fret leveling and recrowning. For those unfamiliar with this procedure, the process of leveling and recrowning previously-installed frets is known as "fret dressing." The frets of this GA141 were dressed because Acit had complained of sporadic fret buzz throughout the length of the fretboard; especially in the higher registers.
First of all, the truss rod was tightened so that the fretboard was flat; that is with zero relief. This had to be done to ensure an accurate assessment of fret height later on. Once I had the fretboard as flat as I had intended, I used a Fret Rocker to gauge the height of the frets, three at a time. As it turned out, there were just too many high spots to deal with individually; and it would be more practical to simply level all the frets.
After protecting the soundboard with sheets of clear plastic, the fretboard was masked off with StewMac Orange Multi-Purpose Tape. Black permanent marker was then used to mark the whole length of each fret top. Following this, the frets were leveled in stages using diamond leveling blocks of various grits.
As can be seen in the pictures below, the first few passes revealed lots of black marker in the low spots. With successive passes, these black spots gradually started to disappear, indicating that the frets were closer to being of a uniform height. Once there were no more black [low] spots left, the fret tops were again carefully checked with the Fret Rocker to determine if there were any more high [and low] spots remaining. I'm glad to say that no more high spots were found, and I was able to proceed to the next step of the process.
The next step was recrowning the fret tops. This had to be done as after leveling, for the fret tops were as flat as an airstrip. Once again, the fret tops were marked with black permanent marker. Following this, the frets were recrowned using a combination of fine-toothed three-cornered files and a StewMac Z-File. The final result was a narrow black line down the middle of each fret top; which represented its peak or "crown."
So now we had frets that had been leveled and recrowned, but full of scratches from all that filing. To reduce these marks to the bare minimum, the frets were abraded with 3M Scotch-Brite Pads, 0000 steel wool; and 3M Flexible Polishing Papers. Finally, as a finishing touch; the frets were polished with Autosol Metal Polish. And with that, I humbly conclude this post. Thanks for visiting, and I'll see you good people real soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for dropping by. All comments are highly appreciated.