Stainless Steel Fretwire...The Good, the Bad and the Ugly!

[Frank Medina]

Please tell all! Love it? Hate it? Why?

[thefishinmusician]

I have actually done about 4 refrets with stainless that niether I or the customer knew about till afterwords...I noticed it was a lot harder to work,thought I was getting wimpy when the nippers took a couple of trys to cut it..Then I refretted a newer Taylor for a customer who had heard of stainless and had thought about it ,but went with regular wire,because of the extra cost...I told him I had some fretwire that definatly seemed harder,and he said do that stuff..This guy was having his guitars refretted every 2 years!!He is that ham handed and plays all the time.So I refret it and 6 months later he brings one of his other Taylors to me and says "Do this one too!"...I did that one as well ,then i decide to call allparts and ask if the fretwire I had was "different" in an alloy type of way...Suprise,the wire I had ordered was stainless!.oops on my part,I was only looking at fret size when I ordered..So now 4 or more people are playing stainless and don't know it,probably won't be dressing those frets any time soon..No complaints,just raves for the durabilty on those who I have intentionally done stainless..I have also refretted 2 identical squire strats,same size wire,same set ups.pickup hieghts,etc..The stainless is definatly brighter,glassy string bending, and possibly a bit louder...Any way,great forum,that's my two scents worth...

[Mike Kolb]

(sorry for the month's-plus relapse, Brian... I wasn't paying attention :) Yep, 'hogging' is just a term for removing large am'ts of anything, with little regard for finesse, to get close to where you need to be. It seems to me that, by using SS fretwire, the amount of care taken for leveling the neck beforehand is increased, as it's harder to rely on the final fret-leveling to straighten things up. And maybe paying closer attention to the actual "uniformity of setting" the frets down the board can bring the initial fret heights closer together.

In any event, the "upcoming" fret job mentioned in Sept. is now history and went well, so it's all moot now. The leveling & crowning took a little longer with the tougher material, but not a big deal. BTW, I charge an extra $25 for SS frets, mostly to cover the amortization of increased tool-wear down the line.