I taught myself to do it watching the 1K refret tutorials on Youtube. Obviously getting instruction from a Pro in real time would be ideal, but that's available in a virtual sense on YT, and hard to come by otherwise. While techniques vary slightly, the most common approach, and the way I did it, seems to be heating the frets with a soldering iron and a bit of flux and solder to release any glue or funk in the slots, and using a set of dedicated FRET PULLERS, not an old set of nail pullers or a scew driver. Stewmac makes some fret pulling shields that go under the fret edges and help to reduce chip-out, but ive never used them. Keep some CA glue handy to glue in any chips immediately, so you don't lose them. Unless you buy everything from Stewmac, I would think you could assemble the tools required for less than $100. If this is a one-off, shop around ruthlessly, lots of amateur-grade fret pulling and leveling tools available for far less than Stewmac prices. A decent cast-aluminum level, or even an inexpensive HF level, for instance, works perfectly well as a fret leveling beam. If you plan on doing this regularly, on multiple basses, by all means invest in better tools. I use an inexpensive triangular safe-edge file I got on Ebay for something like $12 for fret re-crowning, but there must be 100 tools made for the same job, most of them expensive. In general the extra money spent will produce better results quicker, but I tend to trade time for money.... because I have more time than money. About the only tool you really can't cheap out on is nut slotting files. Ive tried all the alternatives, including the welding tip files, wrapping sandpaper around drill bits, adding depth-stops to needle files, etc, and they all kind of suck. I bit the bullet and bought a set of the Stewmac files. Absurdly overpriced for what are esentially feeler guages with teeth cut in one edge, but that's true for all the good quality ones I could find.
