Fretwork is hard on the body and hard on tools. The hardest part is crowning the frets – there can be as many as 26 frets on an instrument, and each one needs to be precisely crowned, dressed, and polished. We can sometimes spend upward of an hour just doing this one single step.
Sometimes our diamond coated crowning file (affectionately nicknamed “Kenny”) heats up from all the friction generated during the crowning. During a recent Level & Dress, Kenny was getting so hot that Aaron had to keep a glass of water next to the neck jig, just to douse the file and cool it off occasionally – it was getting too hot even to hold on to! Yikes!
Who’d have thought that guitar repair could be dangerous?
