setup

Once I took a close look at the frets, I realized that they were uneven in height. Using a few small straight pieces of aluminum, I was able to find the high frets. There were several of them along the neck. This needed to be corrected by sanding them flat and then crowning the tops and polishing them. For the sanding I used another sanding "stick" which I made out of a very flat angle aluminum. I cemented a piece of sandpaper onto it, as you can see below.



The flattening process was quick but it left the top of the frets quite scratched. Next time I think I'll use finer grit sandpaper even it it takes longer to flatten. To re-form the round tops of the frets I decided to use a simple triangular mill file. These are common and very inexpensive compared with the specialized crowning files on the market. However, I needed to modify the file so that the long edges would not harm the fretboard. To do that, I used the Dremel tool to grind the edges smooth. This made my tool into a safe-file as shown in the next photo.


I surrounded each fret with masking tape for the filing and then used the Dremel tool with a polishing wheel + compound to get the file scratches out as much as possible. This worked very well. I'm constatly finding new uses for the Dremel.



A big part of the setup was the making of the nut. My camera malfunctioned during that time so unfortunately I have no photos to show.