Official Luthiers Forum!

I have this ol' Japanese beauty, a Kent Lido model 531 and it's in need of some serious work. I've had it since I was 12-13 and it was my first electric. It has always had horrible action and worn out frets, so it's always sounded relatively crappy. I've bought an adjustable bridge recently and I'm also going to straighten out the neck. The hardest thing I'm going to do is replace those frets that are now almost completely gone, so my question is does anyone know the radius of the neck on this guitar or have an accurate way of getting it without any special tools? I'm trying to make this fix as cheap as possible so any info would be great, also if someone has any printable radius templates, that would be amazing!

Why not make them?

Draw yourself some circles of various (or sections of) - 9.5, 12, 14" or whatever and cut out a section that will at least span the widest part
of the neck.

If the neck isn't one of those then they'll get you close enough to know what to try next.

Last Friday I had a client who needed some cheap radius gauges so I took my templates and drew the curves on a piece of paper and sent it home with the guy. So yeah, what Sandy said, you can make your own.

I'm curious as to why you need to know the radius of the board, it is what it is and we deal with that unless there is some reason not to do so. Fret wire goes in with more radius than the board and that's really all you have to shoot for, not a specific number but more radius. This is unless, of course, you have reasons to change the radius of the board.

Fretting is a bit of an art and if you are looking for decent resources Dan Earlywine's excellent book from Stew-Mac "Fretwork Step-by-Step" is a great read.