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Do you have any photos of your fret ends handy? Do you mean the end is filed vertical, with only a small bevel right near the top?

I'll give another try at regular fret ends next time, with the exception of those high fret treble ends where I'd hate to give up the inset for snag-free plucking. It should be easier to get them perfectly aligned when I only have to concentrate on one end while installing, and file the other ones flush afterward.

Sorry Dennis no pics here at my place of our fret ends but if I remember to take some in the future I will.

The bevel starts at the fret board and covers the entire fret end. Since we use the files shown to take the fret ends back AND impart the bevel the fret board side edge and the bottom of the fret end are flush, gapless and the approx 10 degree angle/bevel starts there.

Another way to say this is you can run your finger around the back of the neck, up the side, over the binding and onto the beveled fret end and it's continuous surface either wood or fret under your finger the entire journey. No inset, no gap, no fangs and the bevel angle that covers the entire fret end has a smooth transition to the binding or edge of the fret board.

There is nothing for the player to feel it's all a smooth, continual transition.

Now ours are semi-hemispherical too but not like yours. The base of our frets stays nearly as wide as the fret with the hard edges broken. The sides and top are semi-hemispherical and we shape our's all at once ON the guitar after installation with files and a methodology that Dave developed.

If you took a round rod and made the end like the nose of a bullet (hard ball) symmetrical all around and then sliced that rod in two along the long axis you would have two halves where each would have a rounded end like our fret ends. It's quite eloquent and very hard to photograph I've tried in the past there are no flat edges to focus on.

The most beautiful fretwork I have ever seen is Dave's and TJs and both of their bar frets are as nice as it gets. Mine are pretty good too since Dave taught me several hundred refrets ago.

I don't understand what you are speaking of with the snag free plucking. We never have any snags and that's usually caused by too much inset, too vertical a fret end and/or a spongy/loose fret end that the string snags under. Our extension frets are identical to all the other frets with no inset which I don't understand why anyone would do. The idea of avoiding fret sprout with a dry guitar but at the expense of making it less player friendly with fret surface is a trade off that I would not make.

I've never had a string get stuck on a fret end. I mean my fingernails always find something to catch on if plucking over the fretboard.

But I just realized, you wick CA around the fret, right? I'll give that a try. It should eliminate at least one potential source of snagging, where the fret crown has a slight radius as it meets the board.

We do several things to help eliminate or reduce that manufactured little curve in your first illustration:

We use a three corner to break the slot edges which not only helps the board not chip someday upon fret removal it helps the fret sit lower in the slot since the same "filet" of metal exists at the intersection of the tang and the fret itself.

Also if there is binding and we nip the tang off we turn every fret upside down on a leather padded anvil and hit the remaining stub of the tang with a file and eliminate it.

We also make sure our frets fit the slot very, very well in the first place matching tang width to slot so that they press in nicely with a little resistance but not enough to cause back bow when multiplied by 24 or whatever. This is an advantage of pressing over hammering I have direct feedback through the press (Jaws II) how much effort is required to seat a fret. In the Martin world or certified warranty repairs which is my world since we are certified with Martin the pre 80's models didn't have truss rods requiring the art of compression fretting. So being able to feel the slot resistance is absolutely what a compression refret is all about.

We do wick in thin CA but it's not gap filling so there may be some little filet there of glue but I can't imagine it's very much. My hunch is the other three things mentioned here go further to seat the fret closer to the board than what the thin CA adds.

When I file my ends I'm never at a vertical angle and always start at some angle so there are no vertical pockets anywhere where a string can migrate to and then get stuck.

But going back to my earlier point beveling the fretboard side and fret ends to the same plane also creates a reference point that need not be changed for how we shape everything else in doing the ends. A guide if you will.

Some great fret work to observe for reference on some production guitars are Sawdowsky guitars and Collings. Both do superb production fretwork, some of the best available. I know Collings uses a PLEK but follows it up with hand work which has always been our position that a PLEK is great for production and iterations doing the same thing over and over but the uber precision comes from the touch of a skilled Luthier finishing it all up.

Anyway I hope something here is helpful to you Dennis. Our world is a bit different than most of the folks here even the ones who sell guitars because our methods have to cross types of instruments, types of music and thousands of different players all do different things. Some who think they are Robin Hood pulling a string way back and letting it fly

We just took on another apprentice Dave's daughter who is 21 and I'm pretty excited about it because the business, this one for us is now 13 years old, very profitable and stable since Dave owns the shop building now and with the addition of some new talent it will survive me and hopefully for decades to come.

It all started kind of sort of here on the OLF too when Dave and I discovered that we were both members here but lived in the same town. Lots of businesses started on the OLF and we hope to be one of the more enduring ones.