I bought a kit on sale with a damaged ebony fretboard- some poorly filled cracks and obvious super glue, nothing I haven't faced before. To make things easier, I removed the frets (I'll install stainless steel frets later) but this process chipped more than it has before, leaving the board with deep chips on nearly all the fret slots.
It would have taken ages to sand them out with a radius block so i attacked the board with a random orbital sander. pretty quickly (thankfully) i realised that it wasn't helping much, it was chipping more bits off in the process. I decided to try by hand, no matter how long that would take, but it was doing the same- breaking chips off.
Thinking it may be too dry and brittle, I put some fretboard hydrator on to hopefully give it some strength back. Since then, i have not sanded it.
What's the best way to sort this out? Hours of sanding with a radius block?
For the future, is there a way of minimising the chipping when removing frets?