FRETS.NET

I recent shoulder injury has me scrambling to ease the strain from a growing mountain of fret work.

Years ago David Collins posted about using 3M's radial bristle brushes for fret polishing.

I have ordered a couple of the 6" diameter version and was wondering if anyone has found a good rpm for them. I'm wondering if I can get away with a 1725rpm mandrel or will need to slow them down with a pulley/arbor rig.

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Doesn't look like anyone else is/has used this approach, David. I  do have a question about it, however. 

Have you, at this point tried to us it yourself? This seems to me like a pretty large wheel for fret polishing, how do you do it without leaving lots of cross grain sanding marks on the finger board? Is the idea to use the wheel along the length of the fingerboard?

I just got my wheels in the mail today Ned.

The included info says 1700-5000rpm should work. In other words a bench grinder motor.

I'm trying to go from hand crowning w/ a diamond file to polished with machines.

Dave Collins seems to suggest it can work without taping the board but it's hard to imagine it not leaving cross grain scratches.

I have the board taped for crowning and polishing anyway, so if the wheels can eliminate the hand work I do w/ p800 and 1000g cami paper before a buffing wheel,  it will be easier on my newly torn rotator cuff!

I hope to do a test on some frets this afternoon. I'll report back.

Sorry for not replying - I just haven't been checking in here too often lately.

Short answer - they're magic. No, they don't leave any cross grain scratches by the time you're done. Sometimes on softer rosewood a there can be a slight ripple effect left, which I just wax over and leave because it doesn't stand out at all. If you do want to get rid of this sight ripple though, it comes out easy with a quick swiping of 0000 steel wool.

They do have to be broken in when brand new though. When I change a wheel, I will often hit it with a bit of 240-320 sandpaper to soften the fresh corners. Then run them on a test board to be sure they're broken in, but that's usually all it takes.

Tape can be another issue. Sometimes we have to use it on finished or rare cases where we don't want to disturb original tooling marks which somehow have remained intact on inlays. You have to be really careful though, as if you pick up any adhesive residue from the tape edges it gums up the wheels and leaves a black gummy residue all over the frets to be cleaned up. It stays on the wheels too, so you have to go back and clean their surfaces again with sandpaper to avoid dirtying up the next board you polish.

I don't recall what speed I set mine at, but 1725 should be fine. I use 220, 400, 6mic, and 1mic. There's a bit of a learning curve for speed and pressure, but once you get used to it you'll wonder how you ever got along without.

Thanks David.

I like the Idea of a dedicated repair forum. I'm surprised this place has not drawn more people from other specialty forums like the Martin forum or The electric guys on the gear page. Maybe repair just doesn't have the sex appeal to bring in the numbers. Hopefully it will hit a critical mass some day and be more active.

I put a 400 and a 6mic on a 1725 grinder and played w/them at the end of the day today.

They have a truly unique feel to them.

I find it inexplicable they didn't leave a significant scratch pattern on the Rosewood test neck I was using. I wouldn't believe it if I didn't see it there in front of me.

Thanks for the heads up on the tape goo thing.

The thin line of marker left on the fret tops after crowning gets erased straight away which is a little disconcerting. I need to level the fret tops, use the wheels, and then take a test swipe with my finest paper on a leveling beam again to make sure I'm not altering the fret plane w/ them. Seems to good to be true.

I also bought just the two wheels to hedge my bet somewhat and figured that because I usually use p800 after the crowning file, 400g would be an adequate starting grit. When I look through a microscope I see the 400 is rounding the crowning scratches not really removing them. They are smooth but a little," blobby", if that make sense. I am reluctant to back up to a 220 wheel for fear of further altering the fret tops but I'll probably give it a go next time I order something from the supplier.

Now my mind is stuck on coming up with an arbor system that doesn't take over the shop. Having to pull out the wheels and set them up each time defeats some of the speed gains. I already have a finish buffer w/ two wheels, a white bone buffing wheel, a fret buffer with rouge for polishing, and now I'm going to add at lease two more wheels all with clearance for a bass w/ the neck on. Serious shop acreage. By the time I add up the cost of shafts, pulley's, motor, pillow blocks etc., I think it might be cheaper and more compact to just use 4 inexpensive bench grinders. If each grinder has a wheel on just one end, they could be nested close together and each could just be slid forward a few inches on a plywood plate to clear the others when in use. What do you think? Have you dreamt about any changes or improvements to your arbor system?

I know what you mean about having to go back and check for irregularities (seems too good to be true). When I was first developing this method I ran countless necks through the process, only to go back and hit them with leveling beams again to check for any problems. Even using precision 30mic specialty lapping film adhered to my beams that were lapped to a surface plate registered at +/-.000025" (25 millionths), I was never able to find any irregularities caused by the polishing.

As to grits, I was really bent on efficiency, and my goal was to not have to use anything beyond 300 grit diamond files and one 1/8 sheet of 320, then off to the wheels. The grit arrangement I came up with is based largely on those goals. And I put them under a scope too, and although I can certainly see scratches at decent power (almost impossible not to at high enough magnification), to the eye it comes as a bright polish. If you do venture in to the 220 grit range, the feel and pressure becomes a bit more critical to avoid scratches that will polish out by the end, but it saves us time in the pre-polish prep.

As to layout and space management, yes, I certainly do have other ideas. We're still using the same stacked arbors I showed years ago, but I do indeed have dreams for something much better, faster, and hopefully taking less space. Can't show you yet though, because it's still in planning stages (trying to figure out how to get it constructed for under $2k), but maybe in the next year or two. I like to dream big. ;)

I just noticed you mentioned using the 1 mic wheel in your first post. Are you getting your final shine off this wheel? I would love to give up the rouge buff and it's associated heat and waxy mess.

No steel wool, no compound. That's dreaming big for me.

I think I'm going to try a smaller 3600 rpm motor next to see if the speed is out of control. The wheels seem to generate very little heat. A smaller motor housing would give more clearance and reduce size and cost further.

I also realize I can just level 3 frets perfectly, hit the middle fret heavy handed with the wheels, and check the three again as a quick test of the extreme. It would be useful to get an idea of what it takes to go too far.

Thanks again for sharing your experience.

Gotta' keep advancing fret work to keep the Plek's at bay a little longer!

These interest me, so I nosed-around and found that they're available in a few different diameters.

Which begs the question of why not use a 3"dia. wheel to help with the "real estate conservation" program?  

An additional benefit might be that, because of the slim thickness suitable for individual frets, it would take the potential fretboard damage out of the equation for lacquered boards, etc.  The 3" diameter wheels are also less expensive, 

On the other hand, the 3" wheels seem to mount on a tapered jewelers spindle, and that might be just "another system" to get up & running with?  Or maybe there's some sort of adaptor that would let a person use it with a handheld Foredom machine?  

At any rate, these seem to open up a whole new little world of fret polishing!  Thanks for bringing them up. 

Yes, the 1mic wheel is my final polish. Straight from there to waxing the board. The only times I'll use steel wool after polishing now is if I let the wheels get gunk built up on them and have to get goo off the frets. Or sometimes if the board has been previously ebonized or I just didn't clean it well enough it can leave some dark gunk on white bindings, which I lightly scrape off (without touching the wood) before waxing.

Something that deserves mention though - this job is dirty, it generates a lot of very very fine dust. Wearing not only eye projection but also a good dust mask is absolutely mandatory here. Blow your nose after doing it a few times without, and you'll see why. Then we wipe off the dust with paper towel, and use Howard's Feed-n-Wax on the board as much to clean it at pull the dust out as we do to actually treat the wood.
I'm having a hard time visualizing this. Got a picture you can post?

Eight years or so ago when I started working with Dave he had just finished the "fret buffer."  A huge part of the motivation IIRC was Dave has a lot of interest in how things were done back in the day.  We know that at least G*bson used a wire wheel as evidenced by the cross grain stretches that were left as a tell tale.

I learned early on to use the fret buffer and back then I had a business in Tecumseh, where I live, doing repair work too.  At my Tecumseh shop I did not have the pleasure of having a fret buffer and it sucked...  Sure going though consecutive grits of sand paper is not all that difficult but the fret buffer is way faster and the results are IME superior as well in so much as the shine is awesome and  fret scratches are nonexistent.  

Just to illustrate how much the fret buffer really shines up the frets after I leave the buffer I typically hit the frets and board with OOOO steel wool to remove any tape residue and what happens is the shine is reduced from what it was off the buffer.  That should tell you something, off the buffer the shine is superior to after OOOO steel wool.

Time wise it's about 4 passes on each side of the neck with each of the four wheels.  Takes me around three minutes I would guess and again that's way faster than sandpaper....

In case anyone is interested in costs to do it this way after you have built the buffer the wheels are a bit pricey but you also can get hundreds of fret dresses out of a wheel as well.  I'm guessing at present but some quick math in my head and knowing what "quality" sand paper that won't fall apart when flossing the frets I would suspect that a fret buffer may not cost any more to use than traditional methods.

These days the only tough part about using a fret buffer has nothing to do with the buffer itself.  Instead if taping a board for say a maple Fender board quality 1/4" masking tape is hard to source on our neck of the woods.  But beyond this having done lots of fret dresses with traditional methods and the fret buffer the fret buffer is a real pleasure to use.

Especially for us older farts too!

PS:  Wear a dust mask, not aware of any issues but dust is generated by the wheels and material removal and better safe than sorry.

The 3" wheels would require a skinny mandrel to get clearance. Especially if the diameters shrink as they wear.

If dust collection is mandatory, ( 1mic ceramic grit in the lungs sounds grim), it could be hard to set up for a moving hand piece. Plus, I suspect there might be more abrasive for you money in the larger wheels, even though the cost is higher up front.

I don't think you could get an individual fret with a thin wheel. The scratches are on the sides so hitting the board some is inevitable.

This AM I tried 3400 rpm and it seems ok. If I loiter with the horizontal motion the 6 layers that make up the wheel start to show a pattern but I think light and keep moving will work.

If I get a temporary set up I'll post a pic.

I always wanted to try these for the time savings but a bum shoulder finally forced me to get off my butt.

It's hard to know what projects, jigs, "improvements" etc. that are constantly on my mind will be worth the time and money investment. I wish I had started messing with these a long time ago.

Stainless wire?

Hi All,

Thanks for this information, I have also added the aforementioned rotator cuff injury to my list of things that fall apart at the worst possible time and coupled with other stuff taught myself to work left handed to help spread the strain (not as difficult as one thinks). 

Hesh mentions getting hold of skinny masking tape: the good quality stuff is expensive where we are and we use a lot of it, often slitting tape to get the correct widths which is a bit of a pain. 

For the international members:

Using overall cost analysis  we find it cheaper to buy the multi width tape 3 packs from Philadelphialuthiertools.com which is blue grade in three width going down to 1/4" - we also buy our Jescar stainless frets from these guys in pre-radiused and pre-cut fret packs and combine the shipping.   When all the sums are done on this sort of transaction it turns out cheaper for us to adopt this retail buy than say, buy direct from Jescar who will only ship at the insured express rates which is poison. 

Most of you know the drill but the new guys tend to take a bath with expensive work practices and excessive shipping charges (just like we did).  Obviously there are other sources than the one mentioned but this is the one we use because of their cheap shipping.

Anyway, I'm up for giving these wheels a go and will see.

Rusty.

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