In this article I explain and show the re-fretting of a guitar. It was an instrument which was inacceptably bad in intonation after an obvious manufacturing fault. After a short examination, it was clear that the bridge has been laminated wrong by 2 mm and the frets have not been on the positions they should have. How such extreme faults occur is up to guessing… maybe an old and deranged CNC saw or an untrained operator that positions the bridges or too much red wine in the spanish workshop, it came from…
After taht examination it was clear, that only a new fretting would do the job. So I took of the old frets carefully, not to brake out to much of the wood at the nut:
In the next step. the nuts were closed with glue and wood dust from sanding the fretboard in order to get a smooth and nice surface again:
After some 8-9 runs of sanding and filling, the fretboard was closed and the old nuts were only visible by a small difference in color. This would dissapear later by oiling the wood:
Now I had to calculate the new fret positions, where I used my patented formula. And I had to calculate with two scale lengths as the bridge was twisted so much. One was 64,9 cm for the 1st string and 65,3 for the bass string. In the end, this fanned the frets even more, than my patent does. But this is still so small that most playrs won’t notice and it does not affect playability at all.
On this image you see, how far the right positions (bright pencil lines) were away from the old wrong ones (dark):
Now sawing the nuts:
…and press the new frets into the nuts:
Now I had to bring the new frets to the width of the fingerboard:
…and prepare the frets so that they are on one level and have no sharp edges:
…and finally to oil the “new” fingerboard:
…have a final check and then put on new strings:
On that last image, one sees the twisted bridge which was the cause for that desaster. Just a replacement of the bridge would not have done the job, because the frets were wrongly positioned as well.
Now the guitar sounds by far better as all overtones are developing far better and the owner wrote to me that he feels as if he had a brand new instrument after playing it for the first time.