Ok I feel like an idiot here, but what exactly is he doing that is so wrong? I can tell by the looks of the "leveled" frets that they are far from that, but what is wrong with his crowning technique? I may be an idot and just seem to be missing the obvious here.

An important point to consider is that crowning files leave relatively rough marks behind -- one needs to be careful that removing these marks does not affect the fret height.

I agree , it appears that his leveling is not even close . I dont crown the frets like that , but if it works for him so be it .

Am I the only one here that prefers a slight flat at the top of the fret ?

Thanks Murray! Last week I was looking for pics on the web of....................... "the line..." so that I could post them in the other thread where the notion of counting strokes is off the mark and instead you want to work to the line....

Today I did a fret dress on one of the better made electrics IMO a G&L with some issues... This one has jumbo frets and as mentioned in the other thread too it's very common with Fender bolt-on style (even other makers who use a bolt-on necks) to have a ski ramp of sorts over the body. These over the body frets rise in height and are often the limiting factor to getting decent action. This is true with acoustics as well but usually not to the same degree as these bolt-on style necks.

We do a lot of fret work with the volume of guitars that we fix annually and I'm often the one doing it hernias and all....

Dave taught me to do this stuff about 8 years ago now and with his methods the level of precision that we are able to reliably obtain has not led to any client requests to date that we could not make happen for them.

Although the video is indeed a shame just like in many pursuits the marketplace is not forgiving of hack work and typically and in short order a correction.... gets made one way of the other.... Someone mentioned that this poor fellow is no longer in business and the reasons why likely have a great deal to do with what we see above. Not trying to be unkind but personally I mirror Chris's comments about hacks that do not know their limitations and instead feel entitled to destroy the valuable personal property of others.

Lutherie is a trade where it's often the case that the skills that one develops... or not.... are developed in a vacuum or more specifically the budding Luthier wannabe learns the trade in isolation without the benefits of a mentor, a skilled Luthier, and as such the standards that anyone who has worked in the trade very long will develop and hold dear remain foreign to these sorts...

When you do enough of this stuff you learn quickly that these professional standards are super important in so much as once learned and respected you know what you can promise and to whom, when, etc. and then deliver over and over again without any issues.

Videos are in and of themselves not a great tool for this kind of thing in so much as some of the things that we should be focusing on cannot be seen very well if at all in the example that Murray posted. More specifically the line, remember the line.....

We can see this fellow's line and they look about 4 to 6 times wider than they could be and he calls it good.... Not good.

Anyway today while doing a fret dress on the G&L also suffering from the dreaded fret board extension ski ramp I decided to take a few quick and not so great pics with my IPhone for laughs.

In the pics below and please excuse the poor quality, this is not an easy thing to photograph or even see. The light has to be a very small window of placement to differentiate the line from the rest of the fret.

One pic shows over the body frets that are being milled down because of the ski ramp. You will see that the height varies because the amount of material varies in terms of what has to be removed to achieve the level set and fall away desired. If this was a refret we would have milled the board to the desired shape and then most frets would have a similar amount and very little material needing removal.

But in this case it's just a fret dress so the board stays as is imprecision and all.

Some things to note. Just in this one photo you see different amounts of material removed from different frets and also in different regions of the same fret. Again the tops are all level to the fret plane but the board is not level which is why we see this.

It's worth noting that because of the different amounts of material removed from the various frets that it's rather obvious that when recrowning the number of passes with a crowning file, any crowning file or even a three corner file will vary.

There is NO counting strokes....

We also see another pic of the crowning process. You can see the lines, pretty fine and a bit broken in some places. This was the first pass and especially with jumbo frets where we have copious amounts of material to file through our process has multiple passes. The lines that you see are not the finished product but the results of pass one, there will be another pass and for really tough jobs we might repeat this process three times.

Although what we see here is not the finished line it is very close and likely 95% or so where we will end up. It's also vastly superior to what we see on new instruments.... PLEK or not....

Also seeing my lines, that we work to.... and noting how wide the fellow's in the video are you can see the differences.... The reason for the fine line is that you do not want fret surface that is not being actually fretted close to being in contact with the vibrating string. That is rather obvious I think.

Lastly once the final level is achieved with precision leveling beams AND the entire fret plane is addressed as a whole and never in isolation chasing individual frets... the frets are crowned, the lines achieved (number of strokes varies again..........), a very slight leveling is done again and the lines refined and in this final pass the lines are unbroken and uniform. In the pics some of my lines are indeed broken or the light is masking them for the photo. The final process has straight, centered, very fine, unbroken lines.

Frets are then sanded and polished as you would.

If you recall my rants about the f*ctory bevel angles being way too steep and nothing more than a cheap, quick practice that is thought to eliminate the need for semi-skilled labor to actually shape the fret ends instead these pictures show in a rather glaring manner the reasons why.

If you note the fret ends you can see some of my marker that has not been removed in the leveling process. These areas represent valuable fret topside surface area that better players often ask for and was sadly and recklessly abandoned by the manufacturers again in favor of cutting production costs....

Once this has been done the only way to restore this fret top side playing area is a refret. Not cheap, not easy, a crying shame that it's even necessary on a new instrument and very much a case of something that was important and was sadly lost in time in favor of shotty practices.

Who loses? The players - the most important people on earth to a skilled and professional Luthier.