Just did my first bit of fret work

  • Thread starter Thread starter Doug H
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Doug H

Doug H

I'll be there
So I picked up this used mex 63 strat. Really bad stratitis but that's another story. after a few months I started getting frustrated playing above the 12th fret. Most notably the high e was fretting out bending up to an A. I went to the local shop with the idea of having it refretted. Basically money was no object, I wanted it as right as the guitar would allow. The guy at the shop said there was still a lot of fret left on the neck so we decided on a fret dress. I got it baclk and the high E wasn't fretting out anymore but it was still dead above the 12th.

After some delibaration I decided that my neck has a bit of toungue rise and/or it's seen a lot of wear and lowering the last few frets would be a good thing. So I got out the file and the masking tape and whittled away.

Wow, what a difference. On my first test play I cranked the b string up to a high E (or f# can't remember) and just let it hang for 30 seconds.

There was only one minor casualty I've found so far, the 19th fret on the A string is not quite pure :0. I'm not sure if it was that way before (probably not) Other than that it plays pretty good all the way up. I'm going to take a close look at what I did and see if I can spot anything obvious.

No real reason for this post other than I just wanted to blab about it. It was easy as hell and took about half an hour, some masking tape and a metal file. I poked aroujd with a straight edge and a gapper before hand to get an ida of which frets were too high.

Axe feels like a guitar now when I hold it in my hand :).
 
I hope you remembered to round the frets a little after you got them filed down to the right height, that centers the contact point on the fret and for some unknown (to me anyway) reason keeps the filed frets from buzzing.
 
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