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Posted: Fri Apr 16, 2010 4:48 pm
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nikininja wrote:
Give the bloke a break eh lads, he's a busy man.

last I heard he was carving some massive 200meter radius cork for some icy mountain somewhere, :?


Haha - just saw that! :D

Seems I'm always up the wrong volcano... :roll: :lol:

Cheers - C


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Posted: Fri Apr 16, 2010 5:10 pm
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Ceri wrote:


Seems I'm always up the wrong volcano... :roll: :lol:

Cheers - C


How much did Hosco charge for the 200M sanding block, thats what I want to know. :lol:

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Posted: Fri Apr 16, 2010 7:10 pm
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Ceri wrote:
nikininja wrote:
Give the bloke a break eh lads, he's a busy man.
Seems I'm always up the wrong volcano... :roll: :lol: Cheers - C

Seems that Pele's having herself up something out your way. Lucky not to have been traveling this time. :wink:

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Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 4:53 am
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This is one of the most indepth luthier online classes I have ever witnessed.
So many lessons...and illustrated to boot. Brilliant!!!!!!


I am learning quite a bit and will use the fretting technique to repair the damaged neck I recieved from Ebay. (they refunded the $, I kept the neck).

Surgery Like precision....this is coming along beautifully Ceri!-N 8)


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Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 5:27 am
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BastardN wrote:
This is one of the most indepth luthier online classes I have ever witnessed.So many lessons...and illustrated to boot. Brilliant!!!!!!
I am learning quite a bit and will use the fretting technique to repair the damaged neck I recieved from Ebay. (they refunded the $, I kept the neck).Surgery Like precision....this is coming along beautifully Ceri!-N 8)

Ceri-I know you have the wherewithall to possibly see a book out of this. :idea:

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Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 7:40 am
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ZZDoc wrote:
Ceri-I know you have the wherewithall to possibly see a book out of this. :idea:


If you did put a book together, I would buy it for sure...so the law of marketing says, if I would buy one, then I represent at least a % of people who, too, would buy it......money to be made here and help to be given....so what do you say Mr. C?????? :P

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Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 8:46 am
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Xhefri wrote:
ZZDoc wrote:
Ceri-I know you have the wherewithall to possibly see a book out of this. :idea:


If you did put a book together, I would buy it for sure...so the law of marketing says, if I would buy one, then I represent at least a % of people who, too, would buy it......money to be made here and help to be given....so what do you say Mr. C?????? :P


I'd buy one, and send it to Ceri for an autograph. With return postage of course :wink:

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Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2010 2:10 pm
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Inspiring stuff Ceri, I have some pics for you by the way but cannot upload them here, not an easy process, do you have email?


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Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 7:42 am
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ZZDoc wrote:
BastardN wrote:
This is one of the most indepth luthier online classes I have ever witnessed.So many lessons...and illustrated to boot. Brilliant!!!!!!
I am learning quite a bit and will use the fretting technique to repair the damaged neck I recieved from Ebay. (they refunded the $, I kept the neck).Surgery Like precision....this is coming along beautifully Ceri!-N 8)

Ceri-I know you have the wherewithall to possibly see a book out of this. :idea:

I agree with ZZDoc, that would be quite a book.
And I would have to get one.!!-N 8)


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Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 4:43 pm
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BastardN wrote:
ZZDoc wrote:
BastardN wrote:
This is one of the most indepth luthier online classes I have ever witnessed.So many lessons...and illustrated to boot. Brilliant!!!!!!
I am learning quite a bit and will use the fretting technique to repair the damaged neck I recieved from Ebay. (they refunded the $, I kept the neck).Surgery Like precision....this is coming along beautifully Ceri!-N 8)

Ceri-I know you have the wherewithall to possibly see a book out of this. :idea:

I agree with ZZDoc, that would be quite a book.
And I would have to get one.!!-N 8)

:lol: Thanks, guys. What ZZDoc is getting at is that he happens to know that my wife is in publishing. Unfortunately, that means I have some idea of the sales threshold a publisher might be looking for. And with the best will in the world I doubt they'd find it in this one. 'Specially given that it's all already available on the net for free! :D

But on that - howsabout another chapter?

The lacquer on this neck is obviously cured enough that we can do some work, so time to dress those frets. First I knocked back the fingerboard with wet-and-dry, used wet. This photo was halfway through the first rub down with P600 paper:
Image

Fiddly and tedious with the frets in the way, obviously. After that, same again with P1000, and then again with P1500. At that point we could buff to a high polish (once the lacquer has cured some more) for a glossy vintage Fender look. Or, we could just leave it at the P1500 stage for a matt-satin finish - and that is what I shall be doing. In fact, only the headstock and the sides of the heel will get a gloss buff up: the rest will stay satin for player comfort.

Now. I hesitate nervously before discussing levelling and crowning, after reading this recent post on another thread from Forum user Martian:
Martian wrote:
As far as being your own tech goes, like many have posted, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to achieve basic setups, wirings, etc. by yourself. I do however caution very strongly that although many books have been written on many aspects of guitar servicing, there are many things that not only can't one learn from books but as I've seen over and over and over again, it is the abridged information on many a topic found in 'do-all' guitar servicing books which oftentimes create and compound other problems by 'do it yourselfers'. One example out of many is fret work. Surely, reading about it and then buying every ancillary tool on the planet related to it is of no practical benefit. Such things have to be taught to the apprentice and (s)he in turn, must practice many techniques on many levels within the discipline many times WITH guidance until any semblance of skilled autonomy can be achieved.

Last but not least, many tasks do but many do not go as predictably 'text book' simple as are explained in these 'do-all' books.


Fact is, Mr Martian has more experience of this stuff than most of us put together. What's worse, I absolutely did learn my fretting from books and magazines, not from years' apprenticeship at the hands of a master. So I feel downright cheeky even showing pictures of my humble fretting methods.

However. Big gulp - let's do it anyway.

I absolutely agree with the above that we don't need to go over the top on expensive tools. However, we do need some. Here's mine:
Image

A couple of different length steel rules, and then left to right a diamond coated whetstone (many alternative options on that item), a fret crowning file, a fret end dressing file, and a radiused sanding block with fine wet-and-dry paper. I guess we could do the job with even less, but I don't think this kit excessive.

First we need to mask the fingerboard. Boring job:
Image

Then we use some kind of marker pen to draw onto the tops of the frets:
Image

Like this:
Image

Now we take that whetstone (or a levelling file, or whatever we prefer) and start running it up and down the neck:
Image

Two alternatives. If we keep all of our strokes running parallel to the centre line of the neck then we will file the tops of the frets to a section of a cylinder, as our regular 12 inch radius fingerboard already is. However, if as we move out from the centre our strokes get closer and closer to the angle of the edges of the fingerboard then we will effectively smooth the surface of those frets into a section of a cone - effectively, a "compound" radius along the length of the neck.

That is completely a matter of choice. I'm keeping my strokes strictly parallel so that the end result is all of the frets should have the same 12 inch radius as the 'board.

If all of our frets were already perfectly seated then there would be no need to do this job. Mine are not too bad at all - and that is as it should be. However, noticeable issues that the levelling is here to address are to be found at the 10th and 13th frets. Here you see the result of the 10th fret being very slightly lower than the ones around it:
Image

You can see that there is still marker ink on top of the 10th fret in the middle after the whetstone has already "kissed" all the other frets across the width of the fingerboard.

Conversely, the 13th fret is a touch high:
Image

After the 13th has already received a fair amount of grinding some of those around it have yet to be touched. In theory we could just continue working with the whetstone till all the frets have had the ink taken off their tops and are therefore level to each other. In practice it is quicker and less radical to attend to that 13th fret individually with a file and take it down till it is time to resume with the whetstone.

This is all constantly checked and rechecked with the steel rules used edge on to find high and low spots. It would be all too easy to work away at one area of the neck and not realise it had got out of true with the rest. Endless double checking.

Eventually, the whole neck is done and true:
Image

Potentially, if we've done our longitudinal whetstone stokes with military exactitude we might now have ground a series of flat surfaces into the top of each fret, from side to side of the fingerboard. We can now round those out either with widthwise strokes of the whetstone (that is, across the width of the fingerboard) or using the radiused sanding block with some dry wet-and-dry paper (P1500 in this case). Since I ground my frets to a cylinder rather than a cone I can use the regular radius of the sanding block, so that is what I like to do.

First, we mark up again with the pen, so that we can see the effect of what we're doing:
Image

Now careful, regular strokes along the length of the neck with the radius block and paper:
Image

The moment the ink shows us we've kissed the tops of all the frets we stop. This stage is just about smoothing the playing surface of the frets. A little extra polishing with wet-and-dry might be useful to remove fine scratch marks from the whetstone:
Image

By which point the tops of the frets should look something like this:
Image

At this stage the tops of all the frets will have been flattened, at least a small amount. So now we need to re-crown them, that is, make them round again at the top. If the playing surface is left flat the point of contact with the string is too large and the frets might not intonate perfectly.

A crowning file is not quite the only way of doing this, but for my money it is the easiest. They are not cheap, but I think we have to bite the bullet on this one and buy the right tool for the job. (I know some prefer a quarter-round file for this, but that is a personal preference rather than a price one: they cost nearly the same.)

The crowning file has a concave surface into which teeth have been cut:
Image

You find that metal filings build up very fast in those teeth and spoil the job. The solution to that is a little brass brush used frequently to clean the file:
Image

Actually, I almost made a silly mistake at this point. That photo shows my blue-handled crowning file, which is actually the smallest one, for vintage sized frets. This neck has fat jumbo frets on it: luckily I realised in time and fetched the right sized crowning file. Just in case anyone reading this was noticing those sort of details... :lol:

For the last time we draw marker pen onto the tops of all the frets. This time however we are looking to leave a thin sliver of ink on the top of the fret, rather than the opposite. Once the file has reduced the line of ink to a thin line we know the top of the fret is rounded to a near point again, as with the two frets on the left:
Image

When that has been done evenly on all the frets we can turn our attention to their ends. Again, several possible tools for this job. I like Stew-Mac's little fret dressing file:
Image

Can't quite get my camera to show it, but that file has two wider sides with working surfaces on them, plus one thin side that is flat and the opposite thin side shaped to a gentle curve. The flat untoothed side allows us to get right in to the very corner where the fret touches the surface of the fingerboard to remove any sharp burr there might be in that spot. However, we don't want to do more than the lightest work like that for fear of marring the wood. So then we can turn the file over and use the rounded smooth side against the fingerboard which just helps stop unwanted damage.

I round out the ends of my frets with long, controlled strokes like this. Starting at the bottom of the side of the fret and carrying the file steadily up over to the top in an arcing movement, as in the next three photos:
Image

Image

Image

That is just one stroke you are seeing there. I carry on till I've smoothed off the corners of the fret ends to satisfaction - something you judge with your eyes and your fingertips.

BTW: you will remember I put the bevel into the ends of all the frets when I first installed them. That is generally reckoned to be around 35 degrees from vertical, but I like my fret ends a touch more upright than that. I want to win every possible iota of playing surface on the top of the fret. So getting the sharp corners of the fret ends smoothed to satisfaction is even more important at this stage, or the neck will be unplayable.

After that is all done some fine steel wool will both polish the surfaces of the frets and round out the ends a touch more:
Image

Followed by a good shine up with some mild polish. Here I happen to be using some old car polish I found in the attic:
Image

An amusing little detail: in my country a mark of recognition for manufacturers is to receive a royal seal of approval, which they can display on their product if they so choose. Fascinatingly, this automotive polish has two such, from the Prince of Wales and the late Queen Mother:
Image

While she was still alive the Queen Mother and Prince Charles (her grandson) lived in palaces almost side by side. I am charmed to imagine them both on a Saturday afternoon in their yellow rubber gloves, she polishing her Roller, he buffing up the Aston, calling jokes over the garden wall at one another. I'm sure that is what it's like with those people...

I seem to recall that Orange Amplifiers once had a royal seal of approval from Her Maj The Queen herself. Which makes you think...

Back to business. When that's all done we simply remove the masking tape:
Image

We're not likely to damage spanking new lacquer by pulling the tape off, but to be sure it is always wise to remove it from either side towards the middle:
Image

And finally, here is the neck, levelled, crowned and dressed:
Image

Done deal.

That would be it for the day, 'cept I made a promise to rkreisher:
Ceri wrote:
rkreisher wrote:
I have seen guitars with fret ends that look like that last picture in stores. I was just asking because you showed the filing and sanding and it looks relatively easy... My daughter's frets look like that last picture. The frets are not as high, but the edges look similar. I do not like playing that guitar but for a $100 Lace Huntington, what did I expect... Too late to take it back and she seems to like it...

Hi again RK: hey, then stick around just a little bit longer. :D

Soon as the back of the neck is carved we'll get on to fret levelling and dressing. I have tools for that, but I shall also show how to do simple fret dressing without specialist tools and in a way anyone can do to improve unsatisfactory fret ends.

If there is plenty of work to do on fret ends I'd seriously suggest thinking about a little fret dressing file, such as my Stew-Mac one, above. Not too expensive. However, if it is just a bit of tidying up here and there that is wanted then it is possible to make a simple tool for the job yourself. Here's how.

This is some nice fine P1500 wet-and-dry paper. I have cut off a strip and glued one of those little wooden coffee stirrers to the back of it:
Image

After the glue has dried you simply cut off the surplus, nice and accurately so as not to leave even a tiny bit of overhang:
Image

Here's the cut off strip and the wooden stirrer the other way up, showing the surface now covered in wet-and-dry:
Image

And presto, a simple fret dressing file. The plain wood on the thin edges can be safely run along the surface of the fingerboard where it touches the fret, so that the paper will touch the metal itself and round out the fret ends, as shown earlier.

I wouldn't want to do an entire neck this way, but for a spot of work on a few less than perfect fret ends - why not?

(I have an uncomfortable feeling Mr Martian may be going to tell just exactly us why not... :lol: )

That's all, folks - C


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Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 6:03 pm
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Stellar job as always Ceri, can't wait to see this thing together and playable :)

Dan

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Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 6:34 pm
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Getting closer! nice detail....

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Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 7:05 pm
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I can't believe how much I look forward to every episode of this thread. Truly astounding!

You are a gentleman Ceri my friend!

Thanks again!

CC

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Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 7:13 pm
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Your attention to detail is insane man.


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Post subject: The Standard
Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 8:22 pm
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This thread is going to be the standard for rebuilding a fire gutted guitar for people all over the world.....this is just insane...I am listening to my neighborhood wondering if there is a fire somewhere so I can throw my guitar in it for a minute......I am sooooo tempted to volunteer at my local fire dept....Can I select the first song that is played on this guitar?

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