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flattening the radius of a Strat fingerboard


adambomb

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what does it entail, and what would the ball-park price be , to have a shop remove the frets, flatten the radius of the stock Fender fingerboard and re-fret with new wire?

 

the guitar sounds like god, but the fender radius is just too rounded.....i don't like buzz unplugged when i bend ya know?

 

sounds pretty straight-forward, remove frets, shave radius, refret.

any one have knowledge in this endeavor?

 

thanx

 

adam

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Not only is the previous poster right about it being cheaper to just get a warmouth replacment neck with the desired radius. It'd be wiser to get replacement neck even if that would cost more. Cause flattening the fretboard also entails making it thinner in that area. Not a good idea.

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Planing the fretboard is a very common, and often necessary, step in refretting. Lots of set neck guitars, and old guitars in general develop a hump at the neck joint that has to be planed out. It's obviously more labor intensive to change the radius, but it is done from time to time.

 

You biggest risks all depend on how the neck is constructed and how flat you want to go. The inlays may be planed off if they are too shallow. Fretboards should be thick enough to protect the truss rod cavity, those are usually damaged when people try and reshape the back of the neck.

 

Cost? Well a refret averages $175+ for a rosewood board and $250+ for a maple. With the extra labor of planing the board, repairing inlay, and possibly refinishing a maple board I would expect the cost to increase by atleast $75-100.

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I recommend flattening the fretboard just where it meets the body. This isn't as complicated as you'd think. Usually it's done when you refret. After you pull the old frets, it's usually a good Idea to even out the fretboard with radiused sanding blocks. You basically sand with the original radius at the nut and gradually use flatter ones when you get toward the body. This creates a multi-radius neck which is a vast improvement over a single radius neck. Think of the fretboard as the face of a cone instead of the face of a cylinder. Because the strings are converging as they approach the nut, a conic fretboard face provides a more acurate an lower action than a cylindrical one. It also means you only have to sand part of the fretboard to a new contour instead of the whole fretboard. Using a few different radiused blocks at different locations on the neck and blending them together is probably all you'd need.

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