Think your guitar neck is straight? Think again…
When we re-fret an instrument, we make sure the fingerboard is perfectly flat and radiused before we press the frets in. If the board isn’t perfectly level, the frets won’t be level, and they will have to be planed down to a uniform height before the instrument will play well. Uneven frets and twisted necks are what cause an otherwise nice guitar to buzz and fret out. Despite what their marketing tells you, most manufacturer’s instruments aren’t perfect when they leave the factory. Think about it – it takes a highly skilled craftsman a good four to six hours to do a proper fret job. Fender makes roughly 250,000 guitars a year worldwide, and Gibson makes around 57,000 per year just out of their Nashville plant. If a big company like Gibson or Fender spent that much time getting EVERY instrument completely perfect before they shipped it out, they’d go broke instantly.
Don’t believe us? Check out this Gibson SG that came in for a re-fret – we put it on our neck jig (which simulates string tension), set the truss rod to get the neck as straight as possible, and leveled the board with our precision radius beam. Click on the thumbnails to see the whole truth:
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Yes… it’s scary. This neck is pretty far from being straight, but fret not! Once we’re done with it, it will play better than it did when it left the factory 30 years ago.
