This Telecaster neck refret job came in as a straight forward neck refret plus supplying and fitting a new hand-cut bone nut.
The customer wanted jumbo stainless steel frets fitted.
However, when the guitar arrived it soon became clear that there was more than just the frets that needed fixing.
The neck appeared to be sitting firmly in position when fully strung but, when I took the strings off, the neck was loose and moving about in the pocket.
The consequence of this would be that the guitar wouldn’t stay in tune and the action height would be up and down as the neck moved in the pocket.
I would normally refret a neck while it was still in position on the guitar. For fixed neck guitars this is the only option anyway.
On this occasion, I took the neck off the guitar,pulled out the old nickel frets, after heating them to soften any adhesive, and fitted new frets.
The reason the neck was moving about in its pocket was that the screw holes had widened over time (this guitar was quite old).
So, I had to drill out the screw holes, plug them with dowels and re-drill new screw holes.
After refitting the neck in the Telecaster, I then cut the new nut from a bone slab, fitted it in the neck and then it was a matter of re-stringing the guitar and setting it up.
No need to do any more dressing of the frets because I check levels along the neck and adjust the frets as I I go throught the refretting process. This means no filing of the frets to adjust levels and, after fitting all the frets, it’s just a matter of dressing the fret ends.
Good to go for another 10 years or more.
