Most guitars that are taken care of never have problems with their frets, but many guitars are not properly taken care of. Guitars are left in poor environments or are dropped and damaged. Both of these guitar repairs can be avoided if you take good care of your guitars, but what do you do if your guitar already has fret problems? In this article, I will show you a few easy guitar repairs that will fix your fret problems.
Two simple problems with guitar frets are loose ends and sharp ends. Both of these problems cause your guitar to play and sound poorly. Luckily, both of these guitar repairs are fairly simple to do.
Loose fret ends
Most guitar frets are glued and pressed into the slots of the fretboard. On an unbound fretboard, you can see the sides of the tangs inlaid in the fretboard. It only makes sense that the middle of the fret is held in the fretboard the strongest. The ends are held into the fretboard the weakest because they have one edge exposed. This is the main problem. Fret ends can come loose or dislodged from the fret slot for a variety of reasons. The majority of these reasons have to do guitar abuse. Dropping your guitar or hitting it up against your amp can cause the fret ends to be disrupted. You may also have twists in your neck that slowly work the frets out of the fret slots. No matter what the cause of the loose fret ends, they need to be fixed. The loose frets need to be removed and re-glued in place.
Removing a fret is a pretty simple guitar repair. First, you will need to heat up the fret with a soldering iron. This will loosen the glue holding the it in place. Second, you can use a pair of end nippers to pull the fret out of the fretboard. Then all you have to do is clean the slot and re-glue it in place.
Sharp fret ends
What are sharp fret ends? Have you ever played your guitar in the winter and had the edge of your guitar frets poke your hands? These are called sharp fret ends. Sharp ends are caused by low humidity. When your neck and fretboard dry out, they shrink. Since the metal frets are not as reactive to the changing environment as the guitar wood is, the frets stay the same length. You will notice this because the ends will start to poke your hand, as you play up and down the neck. Severe cases will actually develop sharp fret ends that can cut your hand. All you need to do to fix sharp fret ends is either put your guitar in a room with more humidity or use a fret end file to file the edges of the frets.
You can find more easy-to-read, helpful articles and information about guitar repair at http://www.guitarrepairbench.com/. Guitar Repair Bench is a site dedicated to helping everyone learn how to repair and build his or her own guitars. Learn some new electric and acoustic guitar repairs today!
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