I saw the video and went with that. It worked Perfect!!! It wouldnt have been done any better if I took it in to a pro. Sometimes i you just have to break the rules.....lol
This has been an exciting thread. In my limited capacity, doing tech work on my own instruments, I feel that fret leveling can sometimes be set out in a more complex way than is totally necessary. There is a woolly overlap between theory and dogma, and perhaps this thread has smoked out a little of the latter in the fringes of some posts.
Having said that, there are only a few rules and you can't simply break them. You've either got lucky by applying the wrong principles and somehow just happened to get successful results, or you don't know what you've achieved and whether it is actually successful or not. You can probably get level frets by using a crowning file and dead reckoning, but it isn't the best use of the most optimal tool for the job.
I could route out a P bass for a J pickup by tracing the pickup onto the finish of the bass and then using a dremel and £5 chisel to hog out the wood. With enough skill, and luck, I could get okay-ish results. However I'm not using the best tools or the best workflow; I'm simply benefiting from the fact that you *could* do it this way.
The video posted early on, with that Duck Dynasty guy doing whatever he was doing, attacks the problem from the wrong angle in my opinion. He asserts 'too often a luthier will tell you the frets need dressed when it's only a single fret or even several frets'. I have no idea how this guy quantifies the phrase "too often", first of all. Secondly, why not dress all the frets while you're at it? He took some acoustic guitar (with over-generously rounded, sloped fret ends, which
is the calling card of a hack luthier), and tidied up one fret. One shiny, properly crowned fret in a sea of dull, pitted and worn out frets. He acknowledges this, but I would rather just take a few hours to do an entire neck in one sitting, rather than do spot and patch repairs if and when I felt it was necessary.
Plus, his workflow is pretty hacky. He uses a crowning file to level one fret, and uses the two adjacent frets as his single reference point to ensure he has corrected the height of the problem fret. This method wouldn't be any use for dealing with a subtly twisted neck, and he's using a crowning file for the wrong job.
In short, I never just 'level' one or two frets in isolation. You might have a high fret or a low fret, but it is hard to fully assess this just by comparing that fret with its immediate neighbours. You need to know the whole story of the frets on your instrument. You might be correcting random, inconsistent factory fretwork. You might be fighting a subtle twist or hump in the neck. I've had necks with 'bowls' in the frets. A number of frets might be too low, simply on one side of the neck. When you start to level the frets you notice that you aren't hitting these problem frets with your leveling medium until you've shaved material off all the frets, and when you level these problem frets you have to keep going down to the center of the 'bowl' in these frets, with the fret in the middle of this problem area being the lowest.
On the other hand you might have that one annoying fret that is too high or too low. It might be popping out (I've had this on two Chinese 'Modern Player' Fender basses), or lower than the rest (the first fret on my '90s Korean-made Dearmond bass was consistently lower than the others). You still have to know the full story of the frets to assert that the problem is just that one naughty fret, in my opinion.
The acid test is to get your neck level, without strings, and to colour in the frets with a permanent marker. When you scrub the frets with your leveling medium you will see bare metal appear where the marker is being scrubbed away, and where the marker remains is your low fret, or section of low fret. Find a used bass with roundwound wear and you will be chasing your way to the bottom of three or four ditches ground into the first five frets by the action of the strings. Your frets have to be as level as the deepest point in this wear for you to get even, level frets.
A crowning file shouldn't ever be taking more material off the top of the fret, but simply restoring the correct profile to the fret itself. When I was a teenager I paid the local hack to 'level' the frets on my SG copy, and he did exactly that. He ran an oil stone up and down the frets until they were level, hit the frets with steel wool, re-strung the guitar and charged me £100. My SG had wide, flat-topped frets, and all the buzz and intonation grief that comes with that.
My Dearmond bass came in 'barn find' condition from a guy who stopped using it and stored it away. The frets looked like this:
Ignoring the fact that they are green (!!!), the tops of them are quite flat, and you can see a wee bit of roundwound chew under the D string on the fret to the left of the dot inlay, and on the next left fret again. These frets needed leveling, crowning and polishing:
