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Originally Posted by Rattman  Great... great defret..
A couple of things however: Why did you do this... meaning what was your goal in defretting the bass. 2nd query is how did you accomplish the defret, because the photos speak volumes.. clean & neat work! |
Well... Thanks. I'm happy with it. My goal was to have a fretless. Had that bass around and was going to trade it but at the last minute decided I already put a lot of time into it why not go a little further?
I read quite a bit here on talk bass and some other pages on the net I found.
I started by coating the fretboard in lemon oil and letting it soak in awhile. Then I taped the board around the frets. Heated the frets with my 40 watt soldering iron (???seemed to me as soon as the adhesive on the fret was released there was a small puff of smoke it wasn't the board burning???) and slowly worked them out with the stew mac fret puller. I eventually gave up on taping around the individual frets because the only wood that came up was little pieces under the frets that matched where the fret tangs were. I wasn't worried about dinging the fret board with the puller because I was going to have to resurface it anyway.
Glad I read about heating them with a soldering Iron.
Once the frets were out I cleaned out the slots with a razor. And blew the crud out. I bought some maple wood purfling from stew-mac that fit pretty perfectly in the slots. Tried a few different ways to get super glue in the slots while installing the maple strips. Best way I found was to put about 3 or 4 drops in the fret slot and wedge and rock the purfling in. Then tamped the purfling the rest of the way in with a hammer. GENTLY. That craps thin! Then I ate dinner and went and got some more beer.
Once the super glue was dry I trimmed the excess maple off the side with flush cut pliers. then trimmed the maple off the fretboard with a straight edge razor. Also cut any excess super glue with a razor too.
When the fretboard was roughly clean of the maple and extra super glue I got out my trusty radius block double sided tape and sand paper out. Did a few passes with 80 grit then several with 150, 220, 320. followed by #1 and 0000 steel wool. As I went I lightly sanded the edge of the fretboard with with the corresponding paper/steel wool.
Then oiled and strung her up, Filed the nut slots down a bit and am now working on tweaking.
Now... whether or not to coat the fingerboard?????
