Unfretting an Electric Guitar, Episode I - Removing the Frets
Unfretting an Electric Guitar
Emre Meydan
Episode I - Removing the Frets
This is our victim. If this will be your first defret,
it's probably a good idea to work on a cheap guitar.
This is my precious custom-made guitar, and my 3rd defret job:
Before we start, keep in mind that this is how I worked on this particular guitar.
Some things can be done in different ways.
These are the tools we'll be using for the first episode:
A regular soldering iron and
StewMac
fret puller pliers (#1637).
I strongly recommend this particular tool, because other similar tools don't have
small enough jaw edges - they can't grab the frets. I know it's expensive,
but the StewMac tool makes the process so much easier and faster, it's worth it.
Here we go.
I first heat the fret a few seconds (depends on how hot your iron is)
using the soldering iron. The heat softens the glue which holds the fret in place.
Even if there's no glue, heating helps as the fret expands and pushes itself
out a little. Don't let the iron touch the wood,
and don't heat the frets for too long - or your fingerboard will start to smoke.
When the fret is hot enough, grab the edge of the fret using the pliers,
and pull it out slowly.
You don't take the whole fret out at a single move, you start on the edge
and walk it out of the slot. Be careful not to remove chips from the fingerboard.
If you do accidentally remove any chips of wood, just put them in their original place
and try to keep them there until the slot filling process.
Removing your first fret might take some time but you'll get faster as you get
the hang of it. Being experienced, the whole process took me less than half an hour.
This is how the fingerboard looks with all the frets removed:
As you see, a rather large chip of wood got removed, but like I said,
no problem as long as you don't lose it. If you look carefully, you'll also see that
some of the inlay dots are buried within their holes. This happened slowly over
the years, and I'll be fixing it once the defret is done - the fingerboard
has to be flat and smooth for the fretless to be problem-free.
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