Well, the damn frets are in. Fretwork is my least favorite part of this process.
I had to deepen the fret slots after radiusing the fret board, which I expected. I did this by hand, obviously, and I think the ends of the slots were flared open ever so slightly in the process.
This meant the ends of the frets didn't want to seat fully down against the board. I used super glue to help seat the ends to start with, then I remembered a trick. You can use the claw side of the hammer to strike the bottom of the fret tang and widen it out. There's also specialty tools for crimping and widening fret tangs, but I don't have them, so this trick would have to do.
It helped, but I still used some glue to make sure the ends were seated. However, on one fret i got a little overzealous and widened the tang a tad too much. When I hammered the fret in, it blew out a small chunk of the fret board beside the fret. F@$%!
More super glue to the rescue. A little sanding and scraping and all is well.
For the frets over the body, I don't have a fret buck to allow me to hammer those in. So for those, I opted to file the barbs off the fret tang and just glue those frets in. Not ideal, but it works. If I ever have to take the neck off in the future, those frets will pop right out, but I'll cross that bridge in the future.
That process wasn't without its hiccups. On one of the frets I used just a bit too much super glue, and the excess squirted out the end onto the masking tape I had on the soundboard, leaked underneath and glued the tape to the top. So I get to scrape that away and possibly touch up the finish.
Finally, the stick I was using to press and hold the frets in place while the glue set decided to slip off the fret and went slamming into the soundboard. Didn't seem to do any damage at first, but when I took the tape off at the end, there's a line of little dents in the top from the rough edge of the stick. So there's some drop filling and touch up work yet to come. Yay.
Next build I'm going to experiment with pressing the frets onto the soundboard while the neck is off the body, and try to avoid some of this grief.
Next steps, I have to file the fret ends, clean up the fret board a bit, and the start leveling and crowning.
Here's the dents in the top. They're not visible looking directly at it, but you can see them in the light.
