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You need to be careful in the neck pocket area. You need to remove any loose bits of sticking-up timber, especially around the screw-holes, but otherwise I'd only use a fine grit (say 400) to just generally tidy it up and smooth it off a bit. Keep the pressure light.
Awesome! I reckon I've just about finished the neck and body sanding now.
I'm trying to do the fret levelling bit now. I've covered the fretboard with painter's tape and put Sharpie on the frets, and then wrapped a 30cm set square with 400 grit sandpaper and went over a few times. I'm having trouble figuring out what's too high though. The frets near the head all seem to lose their Sharpie after a few strokes from the sandpaper, while none of the frets near the body seem to lose their Sharpie. Any tips on figuring out how to do this?
Can we just check that you used a notched edge and adjusted the truss rod so that the fingerboard itself (not the frets) were flat before you started the levelling?
If a lot of frets aren't having the Sharpie marks removed, then it's because there are frets at either end of that section that are high and stopping the sandpaper from reaching them. This can happen if the neck still has a bow in it. It needs to be flat.
Ahhh, I tried to get around that by using a straight edge on the edge of the fret board to check levelnes. I don't have a notched one, is there a way I can do it with stuff at home or is it just better to buy one?
Buy a cheap(ish) metal meter rule from your local hardware store, line it up on your neck, mark where the frets are and use a file to make notches in one side. You can have it done in an hour.
I got a 1 metre bar of aluminium from the BGS. Cut it in half and notched one side for ST,TL fretboard and the other for an Epiphone.
Attachment 24033
I've got the other half spare for another guitar perhaps.
cheers, Mark.
This sounds like a cheap and handy idea. I approve :cool:
Hmm, well I've just checked the straightness of the fingerboard - it's dead straight.
Now I'm looking at making sure all the frets are the same height. I've tried the thing again where you mark the frets with Sharpie and then wrap sandpaper around a straight edge, and scrape the sandpaper over the frets (pics here). I'm still finding it hard to figure out what's high though. All the frets seem to lose some marker (I've checked near the head only), although some more than others. None seem to be clearly too high. Is there any advice on what I should do? Thanks!
You can use a stanley knife blade as a fret rocker. Place it across 3 frets. If it can rock from side to side, then the middle fret is high. If the blade doesn't touch the middle fret and there's a gap, then that fret is either low or at least one of the frets either side is high. By starting at one end and moving up a fret at a time, you should be able to work out what frets appear high and which might be low. Write down the results as you go along - don't try to remember!
You may have level frets to start with - but there's no guarantee of this, so it's always worth checking.
Thanks for your advice. I used a Stanley knife blade a some other straight edges I had lying around to check groups of three frets. For each group of three, I moved the straight edge from one side of the fretboard to the other, and marked with a pen where it rocked (like this - red means that the middle bit is high).
https://imgur.com/a/EIPGV
Is there anything else on this that I need to do before recrowning the high bits? Any piece of wisdom that someone has accumulated through guitar builds would be welcome!
EDIT: Oh yeah, how do I check fret 24?