As I’d mentioned before, the Vega that I’m working on had fret slots that were no longer holding the frets in. The frets themselves were also no longer working after having seen some rather strange wear. So, the first job was to narrow the slots, To do that, I use some plastic slips that are just a few hundredths narrower than the fret tangs on the frets that are going to get installed. Those slips act as spacers after I’ve filled the fret slot with black epoxy. To keep the epoxy from going everywhere, I use some masking tape to cover most of the fretboard surface adjacent to the slots.
This shows the fret slots both before and after resizing. I still need to run the fret slot saw through those three newly sized slots but that won’t remove much material since the plastic spacers were already close to the correct width. Some of the old slots were close to the width they needed to be, like the slot immediately to the left of the middle position marker but others, like all those to the right of that slot, are far too wide and would never hold a fret. I like this approach as it keeps the original fretboard but also makes it able to be fretted in the usual manner.
And here’s a quick before and after comparison of how bad it was and it’s new and improved state.
While the frets have been filed to correct length and had the ends beveled, I still need to flat the frets with my straight edge sanding bar as well as recrown the frets. Following that, I’ll take a special file and “break” the edges of the newly cut bevels and then polish all the surfaces smooth and soft with some one thousand grit sand paper.
