So there is more to doing quality fret work than the tools you use and/or just leveling things. Half the guitars out in the wild have bad necks with more relief on the treble side and less on the bass side.
There is also the issue of working smart with an example being how you described the cowboy chord area being the most divioted.
Experienced luthiers know how to manipulate the truss rod and neck shape so we can concentrate on the bad areas and don't have to spend our lives recrowning to a great extent areas that are still in relatively good shape.
The "bluing" or in this example red Marks-a-lot marker it not just something you work to remove. It's a road map to how to approach the work piece AND a time tested indicator of varying degrees of success.
So my posts above describe the use of 1 X 2 aluminum bar stock that is very stiff and over the ten years that we checked our beams every year on a calibrated surface plate the beams did not move at all. The notion that the level set leaves us when you put sand paper is not accurate unless you used poor quality paper and you have not tested the paper over it's span and randomly only adopting papers that are made consistently. We found Saite and 3M gold to be suitable. You also can cancel out many of the errors in the paper simply by turning your beams around when using them frequently....
So yes in the small builder build an acoustic guitar world marking the neck, using a level or similar thing that you have checked for flatness can get you by.
In my world it won't get you by with guitars that require greater accuracy such as one I did this morning an 18" Heritage jazz box with 14's.... yep that's 14's that the player a MSU professor wants uber low action. Folks levels here won't get you to where he wanted to go and that's why we only use very accurate tooling. Accurate need not cost much at all though you can make your own. We did.
Also one of the many comments I read above that is also incorrect in my experience is using a foot long beam. Your primary beam needs to span the 1st through the 12th and then you need a shorter beam to go from the 12th to the last. You never, never, never spot level that's not accurate and remember a string is a natural straight edge too.
The cost of making these beams is mouse nuts when you purchase your bar stock and do it yourself. That's what I did and when I was an apprentice approaching 20 years ago one of my first tasks was to make 4 sets of beams for our shop so I spent a couple of weeks on the surface plate.
So back to the bluing it's an indicator of the level set AND an indicator of the crown. It's also an indicator of relief too..... I had a hell of a time trying to get someone here a few years ago to understand what the "line" is that the bluing leaves and that we don't want to break. When we mark the fret the red will be as wide as the level part of the fret. If you hogged off a lot of the crown the red could be as wide as the fret wire.
With our crowning files we remove the flat top and replace it with the.... "crown" of the fret which is a gentle curve with a very narrow top in the center of the fret. The narrow top is the line. When properly crowned there will be a think red line unbroken over the length of the fret that remains and on both sides of the line the ink will be gone and the fret gently curves downward hence the term crown. We want to preserve the narrow, red line.
So when we just level all the frets and recrown and call it a day a lot of things that are not great may remain and even cause issues.
When the guitar is strung up and under string tension how the neck responds will be as individual as the wood that it was constructed out of. The relief level on the bass side may revert to less than the treble side and the treble level of relief may increase.
So the first thing we do before diving in is to observe the neck under full string tension, tuned to pitch and in the playing position. Then we make a mental note of its shape so we can change that shape if we want later.
So back to the red marker. Once we remove all the marker from all the frets which is not how I do it by the way and more on this in a minute. You may think you leveled the fret plane. You haven't because again under string tension it will change and even the strings you use will have variables that we can address.
If the neck I observed before starting to do the job has more relief on the treble side and less on the bass side which 50% of necks off the bench have I want to reverse this and reshape the fret plane for better playability. Once things appear to be level I remember my mental note of the fret plane and will now begin to do additional leveling while either pulling or pushing gently the head stock with my fingers while using the long beam. The neck is also resting on a fulcrum now half way between the 1st and the 12th.
For example once it's level or appears level but I want to remove relief from the treble side I pull the head stock gently toward me upward while leveling ONLY the treble side of the neck and counting strokes. I may go 6 strokes additional with 120 paper. This only hits the first several frets and the frets after 10 or so and reduces the height of these frets effectively raising the middle frets that had too much relief. Now relief has been reduced on one side only.
Likewise in this example I also want to also add relief to the bass side I push the headstock gently downward with my finger tips and only use the beam with 120 paper on the bass side hitting frets 4 through 9 or so and this mills in more relief on the bass side.
All the while before I begin the final shaping I also have used a short beam with tape on one end to raise that end on frets 12 though the last frets to mill in "fall-away." Higher action acoustic guitars may not benefit from fall-away but nearly all electric guitars AND guitars with bolt on necks greatly benefit from fall-away.
So it's not as simple as some posted above to do professional level fret work. We can shape the neck anyway we want including delaying the need in some cases, not all for a neck reset by reducing the height of the first frets and leaving the last frets full height.
And again I can add or remove relief at will anywhere I want. This, buy the way the shaping of the fret plane should really be a required activity for any builder who sells their wares. Some shops do these things and they are some of the highest quality instruments you can buy or that are produced these days. By doing these things I mean relief where you want it and fall-away.
Not breaking the red line with recrowning is difficult and comes with experience. Dealing with heavy recrowning is difficult and I get tired now a days so my business partner and friend Dave Collins recently invented the Fret F**** which is a motorized crowning tool that works fantastic and speeds up recrowning perhaps 5 times or more for us.
Others may make what they do and what they use work but it's impossible to compare results over the Internet and I know from experience that very high quality fret work is in very high demand by many players but the acoustic crowd is not where the need is the greatest and you can get by with using levels, counter tops, whatever.
Now take the action down and see how low you can get before every note on the neck remains clear as a bell with no slight sizzle or worse developing as you lower the action. Be sure to play every note with a moderate attack too. You may not like low action but millions of people do and it remains the single most common request that we receive daily.
FYI a high precision fret dress takes me about 2 hours doing all things mentioned above and that also includes a full set-up where I take the nut slots down and do other set-up things to the guitar.
Getting the scratches off the frets is something that hobbyists rarely do well and it is a bit difficult too and that's another conversation. As is fret ends and what shapes are decent and the many shapes that suck. Even the bevel angle is key to get right or that greaseball weekend wedding player that I use as an example here may come into your shop complaining that the string slips off his Les Paul fret ends because the prior shop that refretted his ax over beveled the ends. Fret ends can not be added to by the way if you remove too much material....
Most of all though fretting and quality fret work is an art and my friend John Hall has a saying that applies here - you do not know what you do not know until you know it.
Daniel if I can help you please PM me I am happy to help.
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