Levelling the Strat's frets and recrowning them.

Since I was going to refret the strat, and would need to level the new frets, I thought I had little to loose practicing levelling on the old frets.

I have been making the tools needed for the refret.

With the strings off, you can really see how worn the frets and neck are. Once the neck was in the jig, it took a bit of adjusting to get all three support rods just touching without lifting the neck, but once set up, they reduce neck movement to a thou or two.

Since the fret wear was so severe, I got stuck in with 180 grit sand paper stuck to the straight edge with double sided tape. Blue permanent marker was used to blue the frets, to show progress.

The neck has quite a bit of relief in the higher frets.

The 16th fret was very low and wasn't even touched at the start. The divets in the lower frets were going to take a lot of grinding, and leave quite low frets.

I wore out two bits of 180 grit get to the following. Note the 16th fret is still not sanding.