Wood Putty in a Fretless Neck...will it stick?

[loociek]

I'm working on defretting my old Ibanez to give it a new life. After much online research, I defretted the neck and got quite a bit of chipping around the frets (oops). I brought the neck into a hardware store so I could try to find a wood putty to match the neck color to fill in the chips. They told me they didn't think that wood putty would stick in such small cracks (they were talking about the chips on the neck, which are pretty small, but also about the holes where the frets were!), especially with the tung oil finish I was thinking of using.

I thought these guys were kinda full of crap, but just to check...has anyone had problems with wood putty not holding up their frets (with tung oil or not)?

 

[mikeyswood]

What type of putty? What is the solvent base?

You can avoid putty altogether and use sanding dust with an epoxy or dust with linseed oil if you plan to topcoat it.

 

[christw]

I used some kind of cheap Ace Hardware putty for mine. Unfortunately, I didn't buy what I needed. It didn't harden enough to sand or simply not get washed away by a paint brush. I still have many, many more hours of work to do to get it perfectly "flat" because of this. (I'm coating it in poly.) The stuff I bought said, I later found out, on the container that it won't harden to a sandable surface. It's more of the "fill in the holes in your apartment before you leave" kind of filler.

The link in my sig shows this series of mistakes, haha.

 

[loociek]

What type of putty? What is the solvent base?
It's Elmers Wood Filler, and it will harden to a sandable surface. It says solvent-free on it, but I didn't see info about the solvent base...

 

[mikeyswood]

Elmers is a water base and is not recommended for this task. Famowood would be a better choice, but making your own would be better and easier.

 

[tjclem]

Mike is de man listen to him.t