First refret job

[David Schwab]

I also use CA for gluing in frets. That's pretty much standard practice for many luthiers. Many epoxies dry very hard too.

I find the 5-minute epoxy doesn't have enough open time to fret a whole neck, and often dries too flexible.

The glue just helps getting tight ends. You really want good a mechanical fit to hold the frets in.

As far as the glue helping the tone... I doubt it. It's not enough glue mass compared to the frets/neck. It's too thin to matter. Unless you have an overly wide slow and the fret is loose, and being held in by glue. You don't want that!

It's like the whole debate on whether finish changes the tone of a solid body. I'd say no, but lack of finish allows moisture into the wood and that changes the tone.

The frets on Parker guitars are glued on. They don't have tangs or slots.

[guitician]

That's interesting about Parkers fret's just being glued to the surface. The service Dept. must have some special jigs and procedures to do a re-fret.

[David Schwab]

That's interesting about Parkers fret's just being glued to the surface. The service Dept. must have some special jigs and procedures to do a re-fret.

I saw Ken Parker give a talk on the guitar back in '95, and he said that when they want to do a refret, they take a chisel and whack the frets off, sand the fingerboard smooth, and glue on a new one!

The fingerboard is a thin layer of carbon fiber glued to a thin layer of fiberglass. It has the radius built in. The top surface of the neck also has the radius milled into it. The neck is made from basswood!

[Bruce Johnson]

Ken Parker's technique for fretting was (and still is!) way ahead of its time. The key thing was that he used round wire (there's no tang) of some very hard stainless alloy. It's hardness is in the range of piano wire or spring wire. I don't think it was possible to wear grooves in them. They were permanent frets. The only reason for a refret was to correct some overall neck issue.

If I remember right, they CNC cut small rounded grooves across the fingerboard to locate the frets. Then they rolled the wire to a slightly tighter radius and cut off pieces. A fine bead of glue went in each groove, the wires were placed, and the whole neck was clamped in a precision caul. After drying, the ends of the wires were ground off with abrasive disks. There was no leveling, crowning, or finish polishing involved. Once they got the precision of the CNC cutting worked out, it was actually a very fast, efficient operation. It was revolutionary, and this was back in the '80's, when most guitar companies had never heard of CNC.

Ken Parker is a brilliant engineer and innovator. So many aspects of his original Fly guitars are still decades ahead of anyone else. The sad part is that, after building and selling 30,000 Fly guitars, he never broke even financially and covered his original investment. It's a very sobering reminder to anyone who thinks that they are going to take the world by storm with a brilliant new guitar idea.

[David Schwab]

It's been a while, but the way I remember it is the frets are actually flat on the bottom, and pre curved. They used a template with slots in it to locate the position of each fret. The frets just sit on the surface of the fingerboard with no notches at all.

At the lecture, he had a fingerboard that we were able to handle. It's precurved also, but as you would expect, you can bend it a bit. The truss rod was a piece of music wire! He had a whole bunch of the bent spring steel of trem "springs" that people were taking with them. I had one for a while and then lost it.

This was at the '95 A.S.I.A Symposium in PA. I got to hang out and talk to Ken for about an hour. Very cool guy.

[Soapbarstrat]

There is another guy who uses totally round stainless rods for frets. 'TK Instruments' or something like that ?

[guitician]

Couldn't they cut a "C" shaped channel and drive the stainless wire into the fingerboard from the side. Like Fender used to do with tang'd frets.

[Soapbarstrat]

I guess they'd have to if the strong glues of today were not available.
There's a good reason Fender gave up on sideways fretting long ago.

Haha, once on a forum, someone brought up the sideways fretting and as a joke I said " yeah, they'd load cut frets into a nail gun and shoot 'em into the neck from the side " . I think the guy believed me !

[guitician]

What problems did Fender have with side installing frets? I would think round wire into a "C" channel would work with today's precision machines. A carbide ball burr on a CNC router with a rotatory table.Something like a nail gun could work to, controlled by precision position CNC.

[Soapbarstrat]

I'm not going to speculate about all the problems I can imagine during production, but I know with the end result, those necks often had pretty damn uneven frets (some of the crowns would mash down into the fret-board surface more than others). Too much emphasis on making the frets well secure at the expense of playability. To me, if you have to go heavy handed with the mill file or put 120 grit abrasive on your leveling block, you're dealing with a poorly done fret-job.

[David Schwab]

I would think round wire into a "C" channel would work with today's precision machines. A carbide ball burr on a CNC router with a rotatory table.Something like a nail gun could work to, controlled by precision position CNC.

And what's going to hold the frets to the fingerboard?

Cutting too large/deep a slot will also make the fingerboard/neck weak.

The usual way works just fine.

[jrfrond]

The old Fender sideways method was flawed. The depth of the fret was entirely operator-dependent. When you hammer or press-in frets, you have a visual reference for when it is seated on the fingerboard. With the Fender system, the fret's ground-in knife-edge was placed against the slot, held by the pressure block, then the operator stepped on a treadle which activated a cable to pull the fret in. If it was a little too high or low, there was nothing you could do and there was no visual reference for where the fret would land. I've seen CBS Fender's with fret height all OVER the place. They HAD to level them coming out of the factory.

I, for one, am glad that Fender dumped the process after the CBS era. Like many here, I also defretted those necks sideways. The maple ones were a really pain because of the thick poly up against the frets and the subsequent sanding and prep required. Gotta admit, it was a clever, if flawed system.