Stainless frets

[David Schwab]

Bruce, I use superglue, and usually run a beat in the slot before hammering or pressing the fret in. I mostly hammer, but I have a press fret setup, and need to use it more.

[Chuck H]

Good one...

Actually, I just did a dress on this Squire since the guy didn't want anything too involved. This is the first Squire I've done and though I just figured that frets are frets on average (except ss and evo) these seemed particularly soft. Do MFG's actually use "cheap" fret wire for cheap guitars??? What a place to cut costs?!?

[Bruce Johnson]

They sure do. Pick up an original cheapo guitar from the '60's and you can almost dent the frets with your fingernail....Any inexpensive import instrument may have softer grade fretwire. Down in that price range, every penny matters. Nickel-Silver sounds impressive, but it's part of the copper/brass/bronze alloy family. It's essentially a harder variation of brass. There are different grades of Nickel Silver with different hardnesses. The harder grades are more expensive in raw stock and in the cost to roll it into fretwire.

The stainless fretwire costs me about $3 per instrument vs about $1.60 per instrument for high grade Nickel Silver. On high end instruments like mine, that's trivial. On a low cost import, that's a significant increase, although their cost in quantity is probably less than a quarter what I'm paying.

[Chuck H]

Well, it's not like manufacturing it hasn't always been this way but I can't think of anyone who wouldn't pay an extra ten bucks to have quality frets even on a budget instrument. Oh well... I'm sure these decisions aren't made by designers or players, they're made by bean counters. In my small thinking I figured that since fret wire is relatively non common item that there probably aren't that many sources for it. Ergo I thought it's probably all pretty much the same stuff. I have seen really cheapy guitars (we're talking flea market, no name from ???) with insanely crappy frets. But I thought that kind of thing was limited to those kinds of guitars. Live and learn.