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I want to get an idea of how many people round over fretboard edges before installing frets vs. after installing frets.
And if you could describe why, that would be helpful.

Thank you.

Jim

After I install the frets. I want to be sure the fretting surface is as close as possible to the edge of the fretboard.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

It's easier to do beforehand, but you run the risk of overdoing it - and we all know wood is easier to remove than it is to put back on.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

When I remember, I do it before.

After.
When beveling the fret ends I just touch the wood with the file, then lightly round off the "sharp" edge with high grit abrasive..

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

So the greaseball weekend wedding player with slicked back hair like Elvis comes huffing and puffing up our two fights of stairs and the very first thing he says having never seen me before and I am paraphrasing here "you guys better do better work than the last place I took my Les Paul to or I'm out of business as a performer...."

Never being one to not contribute to making things worse.... I smiled at him and asked him he he would consider not being an ***hole or turn around and leave.

He stops, looks at the floor, looks up and me and apologizes and then says he'e there for our help. His Les Paul was refretted by someone who should not be doing refrets and they over beveled his fret ends.

So when the fret ends are over beveled better players who use their fret top surface, all of it can't pull strings downward for the high e without the string falling off the neck.

When the fret ends are over beveled we also can't put metal back on with a shout out to my buddy Chris.

When the fret board is over beveled/rounded we have to hit the frets ends on the end to get them to seat. This in turn makes the fret top surface dive off the neck at the end.....

For those who have followed my posts here for nearly 20 years now you know that I am an advocate or creating and preserving fret top surface. Just because your version of Leonard Cohen's Bird On A Wire does not get into the drunken frenzy of say Johnny Winter on a Firebird bending strings into the next county does not mean that others don't use their fret top surface, all of it. Many players benefit from minimally beveled fret ends (and fret board).

So here's the deal.... and pardon me for that expression... what Steve said above is my reply too we preserve the hard edge of the fret board until after fretting is complete and then with a special file engineered to skate on finish but cut metal fret ends we create a very minor fret end bevel preserving most fret top surface.

You will also find that the semi hemispherical fret ends that are a recent fad with little value... also benefit from not having an over beveled fretboard edge.

The file and I'm not at work or I would take a pic of mine and post it starts life as a 0000 6" file that has been broken in half, intentionally worn nearly all the way and the edges have been safed on Dan Earlywine's Dad's belt sander that we have and use daily. When I move the file along the fret board edge it bites into the fret ends and imparts the bevel at the angle that I am holding the file. It also hits the hard fret board edge and slightly rounds and bevels that too.

This is all done AFTER the instrument is fretted.

So be careful Will Robinson when considering rounding over fret board edges BEFORE you fret it will start a chain of events that as Chris says can't be recovered from because you can't put wood back on once you take it off. When you over bevel an unfretted board it then requires you to "tonk" the fret end to get it to lay down on a surface that is not flat that you created/beveled. This means the fret ends will take a dive near the end of the fret and encourage the greaseball weekend wedding player with hair like Elvis to bend his strings right off the neck.

By the way he became a friend and has been a great client for a decade or so now and he's still playing weddings. We moved to a shop on the ground floor too just for him.

What Hesh said.........well, not all of it, but AFTER.

It seemed to me that preserving as much tillable acreage as possible on the fret top was just common sense, and that the hemispherical (actually semi- hemispherical) fret end idea was a reasonable means of doing so, except it involved a lot of fussing on the fret ends after they were on the board, making it difficult, time consuming and risked messing up the fretboard.
Quite a few years ago I posted one way to fairly easily do it but it did involve making a jig. (we all need more of those don't we?)
It does end up with a pretty comfortable feel to the fret ends yet, because there is very little vertical bevel on the fret end, leaves more useable acreage on the fret.

viewtopic.php?f=10101&t=47056&hilit=rnroberts

8 or 9 posts down

Whether it's worth building a jig for, is just a fad, or adds any real value, I haven't a clue. years ago I believe it was Mario that said after all the work to do them by hand, he'd never had a customer notice them. My first hand knowledge is limited - my wife got sick of my 2 chords years ago.

We've repaired tens of thousands of guitars now and never once has anyone, not even once.... asked us for semi-hemispherical fret ends. Mario is practical and most of all Mario knows that a guitar is not a fret end, a rosette, a bridge design, inlay or anything else. A guitar is a tool for a musician, two chords or not...

Taking a pic of a fret end is difficult to do I've tried but if I posted a pic of one of ours they are very much like a semi-hemispherical fret end but without the fuss. We use special purpose files and "zip" them out doing an entire side at a time.

Students of our fretting classes will have observed and in some cases even tried it themselves. We did teach how we do it. The results are the same with one benefit that is usually not found in other methods.

Most people not all do the fret ends off the instrument when they are keen to lose their souls on a feature that no one will ever ask for... And that leads to other problems.

Those of us in the trade make our livings "reading" the neck. When a maker pounds in frets with the ends already completed the ends do not line up with each other and are often all over the place. But hey they are semi-hemis so who cares, right? We we care we need to be able to analyze a neck simply by a few second look down the fret ends.

When I find myself to borrow from J. Giels... looking at fret ends that look like Goober Gober with the green teeth (character in a Giels tune) I can't do my job quickly and well and that means that the customer, remember them.... the one we really should be caring about may lose some value that I could otherwise provide.

Bottom line all fret ends no matter how you finish the ends should line up perfectly with each other and that just does not happen when someone messes with the ends off the board and then installs.

But back to the OP in the proper process of installing frets and dealing with the ends the fretboard edges that remain exposed (not covered with frets ends) do get smoothed over so the edge is not sharp. It's simply all done at once where the fret ends are taken back to not be sharp, the minimal fret end bevel angle is established and the same on every single fret and the board edges are slightly rounded with the hard edge broken.

Seems to me that there is a fret installation step, the file that I described missing if this question even comes up.

Hi Jim - Back to your original question.

So our process is:

1). Level the fret board we also shape our boards adding relief with more on the bass side and less on the treble side. Additionally we impart fall-away from the 12th to the last. But for the sake of your question let's just call it leveling the board. No effort is made what so ever to deal with the fret board edges or fret ends, yet. We want the fret board to end at a sharp angle to the fret board side surfaces so that the fret ends have something to sit on without having to tonk the ends down. Tonking the ends down is a poor practice it creates other problems. It appears in a StewMac book so many do it but the most experienced have run into the issues created and don't tonk ends.

2). Once the board is level we install the frets with each fret maybe 1/8th" longer that it needs to be on each side of the board.

3). The ends are trimmed flush with fret end nippers with the jaws in the horizontal position. For extra credit who can tell me why we nip the ends with the nipper jaws horizontal?

4). We glue the frets

5). Next we use the files picture that we made to impart the minimal fret end bevel angle which I have never measured but it's likely around 10 degrees. To use these files you hold them at the desired angle and zip back and forth, yep in both directions even though that's not proper file etiquette and we do and entire side working maybe three separate zones all at once. This makes the minimal fret bevel angle identical on all frets. It also starts to attack the sharp fret board edge and smooth it over. So you can see the edge is address after the frets are installed and as part of the establishment of the fret end bevel.

6). Now comes the fret dress which need only be minimal because we leveled and shaped the board prior and that shape, relief, fall-away, etc. all translates to the fret tops. When I do the final leveling of the fret tops I am removing only minimal material in this process making it fast and easy AND preserving near full fret height for the use of the player over time.

7). The ends are done as one of the last things with fret end files and a few 3 corner files that we use to "zip" out multiple ends at the same time.

So hopefully this will make sense. The file pictured below with the BRW handle finishes the fret board edge as it aligns all the frets together. The bigger file is for roughing in and stainless which we do a lot of.

Lastly with this method if you run your fingers along the edge of the fret board the very same angle on the edge of the fret board that breaks the sharp angle is the same as the beginning angle of every fret for a very smooth transition from board to fret and back.

I’ve always been happy with my fretwork because of the class I took early on from Hesh and Dave at Ann Arbor Guitars in warm and sunny Michigan. I’ve gotten good feedback from players and other luthiers so I’m glad about that.

Hesh, you mention only needing to kiss the fret tops because the board was so meticulously prepared. I experience this too and on my new builds I don’t even have to get out the crowning files after final “level”. Gasp, I know…

I will leave the answer to #3 to someone who wasn’t in your workshop.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

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Thanks Brad you made my day! We are very glad that you found value and decent process in our classes and I will be sure to let Dave know tomorrow when I go in. I'm off today.

For those who didn't take our classes when we offered them and they are no longer offered so I'm not shilling for anything here here is what I mean by what Brad verified he finds too:

If you level the fret board with the very same precision leveling beams and techniques, where the fulcrum is, gentle hand pressure pulling the pushing in the appropriate places your fret board becomes a mirror of what you want the fret tops to be in respect to the fret plane and ultimately what the strings, which are natural straight edges by the way also see.

Brad says he doesn't even have to always crown every single fret and that's my experience too and part of why we do it this way.

So the question is still out there since Brad was kind enough to defer since he knows the answer why do we cut fret ends with the nippers in the horizontal position. I'll give you a hint: Werewolves....

Don't know where I heard it, but it's true - semi-hemispherical frets ends is just a luthier showing off. Most players won't even notice unless it's pointed out and even fewer will be impressed while playing.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I made about 4 or 5 with the semi-hemispherical fret ends and had the same experience, none of the players noticed. I pointed them out to a few good friends who are also good players and they thought it looked nice but didn’t see any real advantage. Needless to say I haven’t done any more since then.

_________________
Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Is that because the nipped end when positioned vertically can be forced down into the fretboard?

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

The file after that just has a little horizontal line to take off?

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Why be normal?

Assuming (ass-u-me) you mean the cutters are parallel to the run of the fretboard...

For one thing, for me at least, it's easier to squeeze the handles in that orientation.

For another, the movement of the jaws would result in less contact with the finished edge of the board (lower jaw moving upwards away from its point of contact with edge and the upper moving down and never touching the edge...and carefully done perhaps only the upper jaw moves resulting in no marring), whereas cutting in a sideways motion would result in both jaws moving across the edge towards the center of the fret.

Good tries Colin, Ken and Mike.

We like to hold the nippers with the jaws horizontal and slightly rock back and forth so we are sure we are not touching the side of the fret board which could result in a mark. When we close the nippers and cut the fret end invariably before the nippers cut metal they squeeze and compress/deform it. If you look at a cross cut view of a mushroom it's like a fret wire end. When the nippers cut and compress the fret end AND the nippers are held vertically they bend the sides of the fret crown and what results are little fangs that look like.... well fangs. Since the fangs are also sharp they tend to imbed themselves in the fret board side and look like ****. They can be very sharp too and if the instrument gets dry they can even cut hands. They also require much more use of the files above to take the fret ends back to the board to get rid of them.

Or in other words it's much less work to not create the fangs in the first place and that only happens when we hold the nippers horizontal and use files to take the ends down evenly and gradually without distorting the fret wire ends from the compression of the nippers.

Hence the werewolf hint, fangs....

Much of what we do sequentially when we do the repetitive and common jobs is what we learned will not create extra work and steps down the line. These extra steps can also be more opportunities to screw up making them important to avoid.

If I cut the fret ends in a way that does not distort them I don't have to spend another 15 minutes trying to get rid of fangs, etc.

By the way the files shown, the BRW one specifically will "skate" on finish but still cut a fret end. It's a beautiful thing and every spring I have dozens and dozens of guitars that come our way because of sharp fret ends after they were permitted to dry out over the Michigan, Ohio and Indiana winters.

I can use the BRW file and in only several minutes the ends are taken back to flush and the finish is not touched. I always use a fret end file too with a quick three swipe pass on each side of each fret to round the ends ever so slightly. This is in addition to my set-ups. I'm not shaping the ends, no semi-hemi here I am simply softening any sharp edges.

Again no one has ever asked me to create a specific shape in a fret end but they do ask me dozens of times every spring to take them back to flush if possible.

That's the main reason I still do semi-hemi ends. I shape them before installing so I can inset them a bit from the edges so winter shrinkage is never an issue to begin with. The rounded shape is easy to create with a concave diamond file, and I think individually beveled ends would be more eye-catching in a bad way due to inevitable imperfections. I also inset the treble side high fret ends even farther from the edge to make plucking over the extension more comfortable. Never snag a fingernail on a sharp fret end. 12th fret is the point of maximum string stretchiness, so due to the board taper, higher frets have unnecessary extra edge space that you can put to use here.

Your way should result in slightly more playable fret surface though, since any amount of insetting gives up area to begin with, and according to this diagram I just whipped up in Blender, the "slippery slope" starts in about the same place on both end shapes, with bevel having a very slight advantage. Yellow is spherical end, orange is beveled. Each has a 1mm diameter string in what I estimate to be the danger zone, and bevel is about 0.15mm farther to the right.

To answer the actual thread topic, I smooth the board edge before installing frets. But if I were shaping fret ends after installation, I would do it after.

Just in case, I use a fretboard protector, 4 thou thick, over the fret end to prevent damaging the fretboard edge when nipping the fret end.
I should mention, my fretboards are bound, so tangs are nipped.

_________________
The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

Hesh - Which way do you orient the nipper when nipping the fret ends on the fretboard extension (assuming the neck is on the body)?

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

Sure and that's a good idea. We do this so often, couple refrets a week or so that learning to rock the nippers back and forth informs me I am not touching wood and it's fast and easy with nothing else required including repositioning.

What ever works to keep the fangs out.

For the extension frets you have to go vertical with the nippers. We can make the fangs go away with the files I've shown here but it's extra work and time and risk. I use very thin protective shields over the body when I run my file on the extension frets. I't really only cosmetic at this point no one is going to feel much in the way of a fret end over the extension since your finger is not curved to fret.

We only do fret work with the neck on the body and everyone else should too. There are a plethora of reasons for installing frets with the board on the neck and neck on the body. Most of all when the board is leveled and shaped when it's on the body any body joint hump can be eliminated, fall away added, relief, etc.

In the acoustic world you can get away with a fret plane that is not all that level because of the typical higher action. But the better the player, the more use of the entire neck the more it's revealed that an instrument needs a fret dress.

The ole EVO wire tarnishes doesn't it.

Thanks for the illustrations Dennis but you have the example of what we do in the wrong position making your illustration incorrect. We take the fret end to flush with the fret board edge and if you move it in your diagram to where it should be our amount of fret top surface is vastly more than what you provide. Your fret is inset giving up valuable fret top real estate and the bevel, rounded end also takes more top away. A double hit if you will to player real estate.

It may not make a difference to an acoustic player some of the time but Don Ross is going to need, want and require the ability to pull a high e downward and not have it come off the neck. Same with blues, jazz and shredders we need our fret top surface to be substantially more that what you are doing provides.

If I look at your inset and your rounded bevel it looks like 45 degrees or more of bevel from the fret board edge or more and that's too much.

Professional standards for fretwork are full functionality first and foremost, uniformity, high polish, zero remnants of tool and/or marks/scratches and one last thing, frets would be unremarkable and not noticed by a player. That's the goal.