Guitar Tools

Watching the excellent set of refretting videos provided by Jason of the Musicians Den (Evansville, In) in youtube made me realise how important a neck jig is to making a good job of fret dressing.

Since I live in Europe, buying an Erliwine neck jig was out of the question, besides, I like making things :) The best, dense, staight timber that the local hardware store had was red beech, so I built the jig out of that.

As a fret straight edge, a cheap chinese 1m stainless ruller got gashed with 5mm blade in my angle grinder. One side for the SG and the other for the Strat.

The next tool I made was a straight edge for sanding down the frets. I had a piece of 20x60mm steel tube, so one edge of that got used as a straight edge for sanding. Luckily I have a 12x18" granite surface table, so after roughly filing it flat, I blued up up and used the table as a reference. Took about an hour to get it as flat as I wanted it.

To radius new fret wire, I found a round offcut of wood (left over from cutting a hole in the wodden bench for a round sink in the kitchen). This has a 9.5" radius, so I just routed a slot round the circumference with the Proxxon grinder/router.