What are the worst frets? I have frets on a guitar that appear to have a very thin chrome plating. It looks like a very small amount of the plating has worn thin enough to cause what ever metal (bronze, copper?) under the plating to rust. It's orange regular looking rust. I'm not sure if brass can have orange rust.

Hi stroker: plated frets? New to me: care to show us a good, detailed in-focus photograph, please?

Cheers - C

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It will be hard to find a worse fret idea than was used on the early Applause guitars, marketed by Ovation. The fingerboard and frets were one piece of aluminum.

As far as a pic would go-- it would be not very good and not very in focus- sorry-- not enough to see the detail. All I have is a Flip camera. I have never seen rusted frets so I'm stumped. It is a Korean made bass. The frets are pretty fat. The bass was the dirtiest one I've dealt with. I'm talking filthy . I used steel wool (0000) to knock off the major rust- then 600 paper to go a little more-- then the steel wool again. They polished up pretty good that way but there were still small areas that didn't shine up.

Looking at the frets under my magnifier and rubbing some more with 600 the spots of "rust" seemed to get bigger -- that's what led me to thinking copper or brass with a chrome plating. I don't know if that would be cheap or what.

A guy I worked with (smartest man in the World) did mention that the chrome stuff we had at work was all copper that had been chrome plated. So that got me to wonder about the frets.

I got the bass from a young guy who really didn't understand about taking care of instruments. Maybe it has to do with the bass being stored in a dank , dark basement out of the case. This guy had other guitars down there on stands. The place was a real dump. Very bad.

BTW- the bass is not a Fender

Also I had one of those first year Applause acoustics- It wasn't all that good.

If they were copper or brass they would turn green. To rust they would have to be steel. Not stainless. Put a magnetic up to them and see if it sticks.

Thanks for that Tbazzone- I'm on it--- more to come.........