Stainless steel frets- premature wear

[Rory]

This thread is not a debate of stainless vs nickel frets...I have a question about stainless frets & wear for those of you with any experience using them.

Wondering if anyone has any ideas they can contribute-I have a customer with a mandolin I built. He was getting his frets re-crowned quite often and finally the original frets were shot. He had them re-crowned twice within a year. They were stew-mac nickel frets. Due to his rapid fret consumption, I convinced him to go stainless for the re-fret. I use stainless all the time now. I have them on my 2 main personal instruments that both see heavy use. One is 2 years old & shows no signs of divoting in the frets whatsoever.

So, this mando has had stainless on it now for a couple of months & he says there are discernible notches in the frets already. I can 100% confirm they were stainless-same supplier, same size...those that use 'em know its just impossible to mistake nickel for stainless or vice versa. I know there are different qualities of stainless steel but Im assuming none of it is softer than nickel frets? Going in, they had the typical difficulty of working that hard stainless does.

All I can suggest is that his finger sweat must be of the extremely caustic type-verging on battery acid? My advice to him was to wipe his hands and frets often and buy some files and I'll show him how to re-crown. I just dont know what else I can do for the guy.

Any ideas or similar experiences to share?

Thanks,
Rory

[FRANK]

is he pressing so hard that he is going through the finger board also do you see divots ?man i use stainless steel fret wire from stew mac i like the tang and bigger barbs than Dunlop 6105 if your talking jumbo in the mandolin case i was thinking a smaller wider fret in stainless is the way to go my thinking is that its hard, its a short distance to the fret board ,and the width i believe helps the string contacting a broader area when crowned properly just my thoughts.when i use the medium wire like what i would choose for a mandolin when i fret with that wire it goes much quicker than the wide low or the jumbo my tools will work through the stuff but as soon as i am installing the low wide or anything bigger than the med wire it seams much harder ?its just smaller so it has less life to the fret i don't think it is your crowing it is the life of the fret maby ask if he will let you install a low wide and try it or even on his back up to try it ?

[Mike Kolb]

One of my favorite basses is a '65 Jazz that I refretted with stainless mandolin wire. The playability of narrow wire is certainly up for discussion, but it's a sweetheart for me... bordering on fretless.

Anyway, in thinking about the reverse of that particular situation, Paul may be on to something. If the customer can tolerate and deal with a med-low or even a low-wide stainless fret, he might (a). get more wear out of the frets and (b). even learn to love it. It's a different look and would take some getting used-to, but he could end-up a happy man.

[Rory]

Paul,
Thanks for the reply & ideas. The fret size is similar to stew macs-Narrow/medium- .08 wide. It does not look anywhere near as small as old style mando wire. They call it 'a bit wider than pre-war martin guitar wire or banjo' wire. I just cant imagine fretting a mando with anything much wider or taller & having it look & feel normal-i mean sure... id love to suggest bass frets! This seems like a reasonable fret size for the scale. There was no evidence of pressing hard enuf to cause divots in the fingerboard. I'd rather tell him its the natural 'life of the fret' as you say, rather than suggest he re-fret it with huge frets.
Rory

[LARRY KLOSE]

Maybe the customer is just a masher. I had a band mate who would get refrets on his guitar every year or so. If he went two years, he'd have deep, deep slots in the tall frets, even though he didn't have fingerboard divots. OTOH, I have the original mando frets on my 10 year old Unicorn and Mustang mando. It's been very lightly milled once in that time, maybe .003". That's the instrument I play most. I've done a lot of specific work on lightening my left hand in the past 10 years.

Larry

[Pierre-Antoine Roiron]

I'm with Larry on this one. I have a customer (the guy has some sort of physical disability and has a lot of strength in his hands, and a very slight problem to control it) who could need a re-crown every year. He puts a lot of pressure when fretting a note.
If your customer can bite even stainless steel frets (I'm not sure if my english is correct, but I'm sure you get the point), I'm not sure that any change in fret sizes or brand could avoid it. If he wants to solve the problem, he has to work on lightening his fretting hand.

[Tim Mace]

sounds like a supersqueezer to me but I do use med FW and have only used the gold wire from LMII for over 3 yrs now on my home made mandos w/little wear knowing I don't press vey hard but play fairly often.

[Rory]

Thanks for all the replies-appreciate it.
I did wonder myself about fretting pressure and left hand technique. Not sure if thats why this faster wear is happening but just in case, Ive suggested to the customer he could consider changing his stage name to 'the masher' or 'supersqueezer'! He's playing quite a lot too, 5 days a week, so it may be partly just that its getting so much use?

Rory