Official Luthiers Forum!

That video needs to come down.

_________________
"I've been had again"
Tim Benware
Creedmoor, NC

I only made it to about 3:30.

I thought some of his narration was good but what he was actually doing is another story.

_________________
I'm not a luthier.
I'm just a guy who builds guitars in his basement.
It's better than playing golf.

Made it about halfway. The guy is a complete putz. I feel sorry for anyone who has been abused by this guys' "service". I did leave a comment for him.

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

The file looks like a good product.
The fellow's levelling process is horrid.

_________________
wah
Wah-wah-wah-wah
Wah

I dunno. Looks like he pretty much follows Hesh's guidelines...

heinous. why post it here?

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.

_________________
Chris Alvarado
www.ChrisAlvaradoLive.com
www.Driftwood-Guitars.com

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 ?

_________________
The Shallower the depth of the stream , The Louder the Babble !
The Taking Of Offense Is the Life Course Of The Stupid One !
Wanna Leave a Better Planet for our Kids? How about Working on BETTER KIDS for our Planet !
Forgiveness is the ability to accept an apology that you will probably NEVER GET
The truth will set you free , But FIRST, it will probably Piss you Off !
Creativity is allowing yourself to make Mistakes, Art is knowing which ones to Keep !
The Saddest thing anyone can do , is push a Loyal Person to the point that they Dont Care Anymore
Never met a STRONG person who had an EASY past !
http://wiksnwudwerks.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/groups/GatewayA ... rAssembly/

1) It looks like he leveled a tremendous amount off the frets -- yet, there were still divots. I'm guessing the fretwork on this guitar was in absolute terrible condition. It really needed a refret or perhaps some of the frets could have been replaced so that a level fret surface could be achieved without so much sanding.

2) He was leaving a very broad flat area for the crown and calling it good enough. I use a diamond crowning file and stop only when there is just a hint of the flat area (from leveling) remaining. 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.

3) You don't have to use black markers to see if the frets are completely leveled. I stop when I see sanding scratches on all the frets -- same idea.

4) I didn't see anything wrong with the actual mechanics of his crowning movement. It is pretty much an immediate skill -- you just move the file forwards and backwards repeatedly -- however, I tend to make a longer stroke but at a slower speed than this guy.


In conclusion, I agree that this is a very bad demonstration of fret leveling and crowning. Nevertheless, a couple of those YouTube comments were pretty mean-spirited.

Well I have been pretty much called an idiot by Hesh for commenting in his "Criteria.... Good Fret Work" thread but reguardless what he thinks I do a pretty good job on my fretwork and my clients seem to think so too.

I agree that those frets looked pretty bad and it appeared that they did have divots left but some of that could have been just the light reflecting off of his file marks when he leveled them. If he didn't file in one direction it would leave marks like that so unless you can see it in person it is rather hard to tell.

But I think his technique is really poor for crowning. He was only crowning the treble side of the frets and completely ignoring the bass side. I personally use full smooth strokes across the entire fret. That is one of the reasons I count my strokes. I find the fret with the least amount to remove and do that fret and count how many strokes it takes. Then I do all the other frets with the same number of strokes. That gets me very close to having all the frets crowned. I then go back and touch up the ones that need it. When I complete that I use my magnifying headset to check the tops of the crown and finish up anything that isn't even. I don't use a marker either, I use my magnifying headset and a photographers loupe.



And that is why if I don't have to level the frets much I use a wood block with a groove in it and 120 grit stick-it paper. It is not aggressive at all and will smooth the edges off quite nicely so I don't have to try and get crowning marks out. If I had to do a lot of leveling then I just use my crowning tool.

It just seemed to me he wasn't paying attention to the whole fret and sawing away like he was in a race. If he just slowed down and concentrated on smooth full strokes he could probably do a decent job.

But then again... I have been told I am a hack and I don't have a clue what I am doing... So take it for what it is worth.

Cheers,
Bob

Where did the Video go. How Not To can be as good as How To.

_________________
_____________

EddieLee

I have been using a black marker and a sanding caul with 320g stickit . The sandpaper isn't to aggressive and you can remove the marker easy enough . If I have a spot that seems high , I tap it a little with my brass hammer to set it slightly and then sand a bit more . I have found that I like the sand paper in a grove better than the crowning tool . Less Aggressive and does a nice job .

All this being said , I am a newbie amateur . So take it for what its worth . I have had happy customers thus far !

_________________
The Shallower the depth of the stream , The Louder the Babble !
The Taking Of Offense Is the Life Course Of The Stupid One !
Wanna Leave a Better Planet for our Kids? How about Working on BETTER KIDS for our Planet !
Forgiveness is the ability to accept an apology that you will probably NEVER GET
The truth will set you free , But FIRST, it will probably Piss you Off !
Creativity is allowing yourself to make Mistakes, Art is knowing which ones to Keep !
The Saddest thing anyone can do , is push a Loyal Person to the point that they Dont Care Anymore
Never met a STRONG person who had an EASY past !
http://wiksnwudwerks.blogspot.com/
http://www.facebook.com/groups/GatewayA ... rAssembly/

Good lord almighty, that hurt to watch even bits of it. There was so much wrong that I thought for sure it had to be parody.

Looked up his business, and it appears they closed up this last fall.

_________________
Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.

I went to his web page and he states this:



So that may explain why he does fretwork like that...

Bob

It looks like he removed a ton of fret material from the tops and there are still deep grooves from string wear. that must be King Kong's guitar.

_________________
Bryan Bear PMoMC

Take care of your feet, and your feet will take care of you.

Sandpaper in a groove intrigues me, but I"m not sure I completely understand.
Does the paper on either side of the groove not touch the fretboard?

I used the little sanding stick with the sanding belt and spent two long hours yesterday crowning after levelling. I'm always game to try something new that works better and/or faster.
The diamond file looks like it could work well, but too expensive for me.

I noticed the fellow's frets were leveled flat in the middle but barely touched the fret ends.
During the leveling, Ill use my radius sanding block to maintain the board radius across the frets.
Anyone else do this?

Dan

_________________
wah
Wah-wah-wah-wah
Wah

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.

One last thing...

Why is this important?

When the G&L came in yesterday it has action measured at the 12th and in 64th" with the high e stated first of >6 and 6. The instrument came to us because it was fretting out over the extension.... It was not playable even with very high action of >6 and 6.

At present it's ready to go and the client has been called. The current action is 4 and 4 and it plays absolutely clean even when bending on the higher frets a whole step up. The action could come down as well and experience tells us that we could have set it at 3 and 3. That's a 50% or more reduction in action AND now it will do this cleanly with no buzzing of fretting out on the bends.

This player we do not know what his touch is so we set it low, 4 and 4 even though it could go lower. Experience also tells us that unless we know the player to have a light touch uber low action is not something that will work for everyone.

In any event long story short this players action is now likely 50% less than it was, it does not buzz, and this very nice G&L is now able to achieve it's potential in the right hands.

That's value.... and it makes for an instrument that will be valued because it plays and sounds great.

If you sell your creations IME all the nice wood, pretty rosette, what ever kind of bracing, etc, bone nuts and saddles, great finishes, no matter what the fret wire, etc. does not mean diddly if your prospective clients are not afforded the opportunity to actually bond with and truly enjoy playing the instrument. It is and remains much more than a small detail, it's the user interface to the instrument and as such as important as anything else about that instrument.

Good Luthiers know this, understand this, and will be more than willing to compete with you and your creations on the playing field of also knowing how to do decent fret work and set-ups. Know this....

Good question Jim!

The reason why we want the "line" to be pretty fine and not a wider flat area is that wider flat areas can cause intonation issues.

In a nut shell .007" of variance equals about a cent of pitch change. Humans can hear 4 cents of difference reliably. If your wide line is just .028" off center which can also be a combination of fret spacing errors that note will not be in tune and it will be noticeable to many if not most.

Geez. Do you think you could maybe sum it up in a few less words. My lips are getting tired reading all that. Ha aha. Good to see you neck deep in it. Actually I just wanted to say it's great to have you, and David, out in full force.

Hope you, and all, get to bring in the New Year with a few good tunes. Smoke on the Water or if there's better!!!!! have fun with it.

Cheers,
Danny