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Doing a refret yesterday I thought of adding this tip here today... The fret rocker.

It seems most use it to find high frets during setup jobs which of course it's designed for but I find it most valuable for doing actual fret jobs. If you hammer in frets, perhaps if you squeeze too, you hammer in the fret then sight it real close, I use 10x specs, to make sure that the 'shoulders' of the fret crown seat nicely on the wood the whole way across. Then move on to the next fret and continue down till you are done.

I then use the fret rocker to across the whole fret board, usually 3 positions for each set of 3 frets the low E edge, center then high e edge and look for high spots. When I find a high spot I tap it down. Cover the entire board till there is no more rocking, no more high spots. I like to use fish glue which has a long pot life but once done you could also then set in the frets with thin CA.

The point being is that now all your frets are very very close to the same height so when you dress them you barely take any of the crown off. On a refret job if I can get the neck real straight then I love the Stew Mac leveling beam. I will level out the fret board then seat all the frets and use it again to level the frets before crowning.

The fret rocker is also good for tapping (lightly) on the frets with the small end to find any frets that are loose. Seems to give a clearer difference in the sound between good and bad frets than anything else I've tried.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

I've always used a small brass bar for that, about 10mm x 2mm x 50mm, less chance of scratching the frets I thought..

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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.

Brass would probably be better. I've never had a problem but it does take a light touch.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Reminded of this by a job I just finished and handed back today.
For classical guitars where the neck has a forwards bow and acceptable relief when strung up, but has no truss rod to adjust it straight, you can do a fret dress/level with a length of 6mm MDF faced with wet 'n' dry held by double sided tape.
The flex in the board allows you to dress the fret tops without a neck jig.
I use a small block of wood CA'd on the back of the board to hold the MDF board, and usually a narrower board to mill extra relief as is required towards the bass side.

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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.

you can make pickguards with epoxy you can make sheets or you can do shapes
I use system Three 112 and colortone stains

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John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

I'd heard some makers install poured pickguards. Sounds reasonable, looks good.

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

Mario P. makes his own too and they look fantastic.

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Ann Arbor Guitars

Here's a few tips for those who go pro... Inquire about local business licensing in your area. This includes your city, your county, your state. In Wichita, KS - the city hit me up one time. The county wanted me to follow rules. The state required paying monthly, and then every three months. GET LEGAL, because eventually they WILL catch you. You can't plead ignorance, either. If you have a listing in the Yellow Pages, maintain a website or FB page - you are a target. Protect yourself.

For real fun, when you decide you want to hire employees - file for a Federal Employer Indentification Number - or EIN. You think the paperwork is bad for state and local? The paperwork increases ten fold when you get the US Gubmint involved. Be ready.

I've stated it here a number of times over the years - get an accountant. The one I had for almost two decades saved my ass and my money a ridiculous amount of times. She was worth every penny I paid her. If someone is hassling you - just say, "Here's my accountants' number - call them for answers". She handled it with aplomb.

One final tip - if you consider what you are doing a hobby - keep NO records. You don't know how much you spent, and you don't know how much you charged. The way the gubmint looks at it - if you keep track - you're in business. So for federal, state, and local gubmint - look as clueless as possible, and they won't bother you for long.

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

Some tips for various things I've learned.

1. Never work on Ovations

2. Never work on Ovations

3. Stainless steel fretwork is worth learning to do well and can make you a good chunk of extra income for your shop.

4. Doing good work is far different than doing lots of work.

My best tip. Make friends with the competition in the area, there do exist customers that are simply not worth having around. Sometimes if you get an inkling about a potential client it can be eye opening to hit up one of your friends in the area and just ask "You ever do business with this guy?"

Probably obvious but... when I need a bit more magnification than my normal lens I add my magnifying glass to it giving the sum of the two.
Cheers Dave

Here's a little layout tool I made some years ago that I find very useful for putting right angle lines on my tops and backs when I'm laying out braces or marking the top for the bridge. Also handy when building jigs or anytime you want to mark a line perpendicular to another line. It's just an acrylic template blank from StewMac about 6" x 9" with 2" by 2 1/2' rectangles scribed into it.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

I just use a sheet of typing paper Lay it with one edge along the centerline and you get a perfect 90 degree angle to reference off of. Although yours is a touch faster since you can push the ruler up against the edge of it rather than visually aligning.

I’m sure this isn’t new to many of you, but it helps me. Say you’re working on an archtop with scratchy pots, and they’re metric/Asian pots so your stewmac pot cleaning cap doesn’t fit.. or maybe you just want to inspect them without fishing the harness part way out of the f-hole and dealing with that can of worms…



… a 6mm scrap of unshrunk heatshrink slips easily yet securely over the splines. This allows you to undo the nut and drop the pot down in a controlled fashion, so you can easily spray contact cleaner into it, inspect the solder joints etc through the f-hole. A peg on the heatshrink means zero chance of accidentally dropping the pot inside the guitar and having to fish it out. Once you’re done with the pot, it’s easily pulled back into position by the heatshrink. The nut and washer have remained on the heatshrink and automatically fall into place on the shaft




I guess theres plenty of other things that might work but this sure beats tying string on em, and I’ve always got scraps of heatshrink lying around

Clever boy!

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

Vinyl tubing also works for that and is also useful when installing a full harness.

I like to use old Tooth Brushes for cleaning up glue and other tasks around the shop.
Here's a tip: I insert the end of the brush in very hot water and bend it to the best angle for the task at hand

Hot Hide Glue tips:

Dispense from plastic bottles, including BabyBot.

Stainless Steel nuts and bolts in said plastic bottles.

Freeze bottles and hhg between uses.

Use small ice cube trays to mold hhg, refrigerate, then cut into small pieces and freeze. Add to plastic bottles of hhg as needed.

Another one of the simple ones:

For those who use peg winders. Well first off, when you get a guitar in for a set up it should ALWAYS come with a new set of strings. I'm sure most of us do, outside perhaps a truss rod tweak, but when is it really only just a truss rod tweak right?

Anyway I like to use the old stings for several reasons. Now that I am going into it this post has become about two tips. So first one is, I like to sand the nut down till my little nut sanding block scrapes the tops of the old strings.

But the main tip is, when you are doing a set up and have to tune and detune a lot when using a peg winder count the number of turns you take to loosen the strings. I find that 7-9 seems to be the magic number. That way when you make that adjustment to the saddle or what ever you just count up to 7 when retuning and it gets you pretty close

Great post JF and if you don't mind I wanted to add a few things to the idea of new strings and how they come in.

I too use the old strings that stuff comes in with to tune to pitch OR the desired pitch for this player and then adjust the rod and evaluate the fret plane. Once I have it tuned to pitch and relief set I use the old strings to cut the nut slots. One of the reasons I like the old strings is we use string lifters that can leave marks on classical strings so we use the old strings for the slots.

When I'm done with this off come the old strings and everything else is set with new strings in the exact gage and brand that the client likes. Different brands of even the same size string intonate differently. I set action and intonation in the playing position with the new strings.

Often we get guitars with a new set of flat wounds that someone just installed and then ask me to preserve them. So they don't get their frets cleaned or the board conditioned because taking strings on and off encourages them to break sooner often on the client so we don't go there.

But to JF's point the old strings are very useful and like JF does with the nut when we make a new nut we also use the old strings and sacrifice them as we use huge files to take the top of the nut down until we are hitting the old strings.

I use old strings for other things too like putting light cured dental fillings in nut slots, first the bonder and then they composite filling.

Good stuff.

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Ann Arbor Guitars

Hesh do I gather that UV cured dental filling is your go to stuff for filling over deep nut slots? Isn't it a bit hard?

Don't know where I would go to in the UK to buy this stuff.

Being a reasonably serious amateur I seem to often find I go too deep on nut slots and am not really happy with bone dust and CA glue, particularly with steel strings.

Dave

eBay has it. Some of it is expired dental material, but your guitar won't care.

Hey Barry, thanks. Can you share a link to an example of the stuff you’re using? My dental expertise chops are a bit rusty…

Also, while we're on the subject, what kind of UV light are you guys using?


Pierre
Guitares Torvisse

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Pierre Castonguay

Something like this:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/164530151686?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D1110002%26algo%3DSPLICE.SOI%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D236212%26meid%3Db159173abfd54f15b6514fc8c989823c%26pid%3D101196%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D12%26sd%3D164809985281%26itm%3D164530151686%26pmt%3D1%26noa%3D0%26pg%3D2047675%26algv%3DPromotedSellersOtherItemsV2WithMLRv3%26brand%3DPRIME-DENT&_trksid=p2047675.c101196.m2219&amdata=cksum%3A164530151686b159173abfd54f15b6514fc8c989823c%7Cenc%3AAQAGAAACEO3dp5KjHcePfwPIe%252FQnpMnII2rVUEOp64Plv%252BLFaBbeAKrt9eeImKi63V5%252BmiHSDhZ0EENyT94NBXHPYyrAjHXqVoyKsFMGTiJIWoaAmZZjHOput7GVn0W4tKPrW%252FU5NYK7OJW2NpvSHLJfRZymC%252F7lggJVBQyTWAxZMVjFDepnRSMjApiuVu6QsYQw%252Fc9zBnTAZq2h%252FWARIuzvzhVaIucPr64dthprZKP1GCnjRWLicbv87QXdXvq2bX692C1ST4dddvlcvMvCUYO08YwuUA83CY%252Be7QZsZtvhScDZjsanfdvLq4Fuoa2Y7HPenuMOqYOK2oVZa%252B9h6n81qz3hanWIBh%252BDNjpOWKpsv%252FMurfUqDX9gyy8iQrQ1EquU%252BlNNPjvz8oJzZkGi6wf%252Bg79jn%252BsR9a9Hhfc%252Fv26FMIoSu3D6Sl6bdxb9v8bhS26vHFpvTmyUuA5EsbTVUIDEVyGinGghna6nFvGN7j8ob05gZuNs0P5uzfE6ZU5DhQUJuETjzEHMk9YAnbOiEvzvCAyBPu9AM4Iy0iJ1cu9Rp4gnCsmcG04%252FNSvDMPxD%252BMDXNeBhLNQQFsYzOKHpiN%252Fy7me3bAbFGxMTHCG2YOBSlW%252BIq6DKx0NYgmwvZW1ygLaH4A9cY67vPDjVYvTIrdeFoX%252BdiCNozjqTfxacS4JoPT59jH0KMeLHvMxdiP4KdIC8VUSaQw%253D%253D%7Campid%3APL_CLK%7Cclp%3A2047675

Thanks Barry! What shade are you using? It's a bit bewildering…


Pierre
Guitares Torvisse

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Pierre Castonguay