ca. 1936 Regal-made Dobro Tenor Guitar Restoration, Pt. 4: Refret

With the neck reset and glued back to the body, I'll refret the neck and put proper pearl dot position markers on.

Removing the frets is straightforward. Heat them up a bit with a soldering iron and use fret pullers to work them out.

Note that the fret ends stop well short of the binding. It looks like the factory fretted the board first, crowned the frets, beveled the fret ends and then attached the binding to the neck. It's very unusual and I wonder if the original approach was to have the neck with no binding, and then the binding was put on as an afterthought.

I briefly considered refretting it the same way, but the binding would have had to come off, the frets replaced and then the binding put back on. But I didn't want to touch the fragile old binding and potentially destroy it. So I refretted it the way most guitars with fingerboard binding are done.

In this shot you can see the frets are all removed.

The fret markers were painted on. I am reasonably sure they were done by a previous owner - maybe Banjo Bill Carson himself.

The fingerboard is made of some species of mystery wood and dyed/stained black to resemble ebony. A lot of the dye has worn off; I'll be restaining it.

There are a lot of dents, scratches and divots on the fingerboard. I'm not going to fill them, but I did level the board with 120 grit, then 220 grit paper and an aluminum beam. This also removed the majority of the old dye and the painted-on dots.

Here's a shot of the board after leveling it.

After leveling the board, I wiped it clean with naptha and then marked it for new dots.

I'm putting the new markers at the 5th, 7th, 10th, and 12th frets.

Drill shallow holes for the pearl dots using a forstner bit. The dots were 6mm at the 5th, 7th and 10th frets, and 5mm at the 12th where there will be 2 dots. Use the appropriately sized bit for the holes.

Then hit each hole with a bit of thin CA and press the dots in.

Cut the fretwire to approximate length for each fret.  Note that sanding the board took most of the old dye off. There are a few divots, but they're not very deep, so I didn't bother filling them.

The modern way to fret a bound board is to cut the fret tang short of the binding so the fret end will lay over the binding.

So I marked each fret with a red marker as to where the tang would need to be trimmed back.

Then I used my homebrew fret tang trimmer jig thingy tool to cut the tang(s) back.

It worked pretty well, except I discovered the slot (on the right in the picture) that holds the fret in place is too wide and deep. The frets kept moving around, making it a bit tricky to trim the tang.

I'll need to revisit this issue on the trimmer. But it worked well enough for this job.

Now we can press most of the frets in with the Stew-Mac Jaws fret press.

The frets go right down into the slots. You can see the fret ends where the tang is removed allowing the fret ends to ride over the binding.

I used the traditional hammer method for the frets over the heel and on the fretboard extension.

Once they're all in place, the fret ends can be trimmed back even with the edge of the fretboard as you usually would.

After they're trimmed back, I file a bevel on the ends with, well, a file bevel tool.

Then crown the frets. I used modern "small" fretwire (6430 I think...), which I usually put on vintage instruments such as this one to match the size of the old ones as closely as possible.

This modern wire is just a touch larger than the original wire - the tang in particular is a couple thousands of an inch wider, so I had to file a few of the frets slots wider to accept the modern wire.

Then we touch up the fret ends with a 3-corner file to ensure they're all smooth and don't snag your hand moving up and down the board.

And finish up by polishing with 150 up to 8000 (!) grit Fret Erasers.

Frets are done.

Note how the ends lie over the binding.

You can also see the one small spot on the board I did fill - the first fret on the treble side. There was a small hole between the board and the binding.

Next time I'll re-dye the fingerboard.