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So I have a very cool old Gibson electric on my bench in need of a refret. It's basically a fretless wonder at this point and cannot be leveled/crowned further.

It looks like someone at some point decided to botch around getting a refret done (not this owner) by filing/sanding/planing? the fretboard down around the frets in order to create some clearance. It's only like this on the first 5 frets as it looks like he chickened out on doing it on the whole fretboard.



Curious if anyone had seen this before? This is a first for me, planing the fingerboard down flush is a bad idea as that wouldn't leave much of the board and that'd be a ton of wood to remove on the entire rest of the fingerboard.

Whoever did that to the fretboard caused significant damage. As I see it you only have a few options:
1. Level the board then refret - obvious disadvantages as you've stated.
2. Add wood in the damaged areas. - of course that leaves the problems of matching the rest of the fretboard and also you would have to do something with the binding.
3. Build a new fretboard.

I think 1 or 3 are the only reasonable options. Good luck with this one.

_________________
Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Theoretically, the board should need no more leveling than if it was un-scalloped. It might not look like a nice clean re-fret but as soon as there are big enough lands for the wire, you could put in the new wire.

The tricky part is the surface at the scalloped end would be lowered much more quickly than the solid end during leveling if your not careful.

So the owner decided he didn't want to replace the fretboard. And I explained to him the issues with leveling the whole thing, so he opted not to do that either!

So after taking some measurements I made the decision to refret with 6140 fretwire, which matched the old wire VERY closely except I have no way to know what the original fret height was. Regarding the scallops I decided to lower them just slightly to clear space for the new fretwire.

I couldn't bear the thought of ripping up the old binding to make the frets flush with a 35' file, so I decided to try to keep the look as original as possible. Difficult as there was a TON of damage that the old "repair" (I hesitate to use that word even) guy did, nicks and marks and old stains just all over the place on both the binding as well as the fretboard.

In light of this, I decided that this guitar will play well no matter what. First order of business was to build a fret filing jig. I didn't want the fret ends to go over the binding (the nibs were almost gone so I decided to try to save what was left of them) I had a spare blank maple fretboard from a past repair that ended up not happening. So I glued it to a strip of scrap spruce to create clearance from my bench top.



The fretboard was to file the frets on separate from the guitar to get the frets flush against the binding, thereby not compromising the remaining binding, once I get them filed to the length I need, I can simply install them. During the leveling process I beveled the edges to smooth them out.

I didn't take photos of the leveling process, you guys all know how that goes. Here is the fretboard after installation and cleanup, I hadn't polished up to 8K micromesh at this point but it was looking MUCH better with the new frets. You can see where the previous person stopped with his destructive rampage against the fretboard in this pic.



Guitar plays well now, was alot of work but it was worth it. Not the prettiest fretboard I've ever done, but at least the worst of it wasn't my fault haha!

Should have removed the nibs and extended the frets over the binding. That gives more fretting surface.

Nope, not on this one. Owner was very concerned with keeping it original as possible and I had no desire to screw it up.further by chopping off even more of the already damaged binding.

In this case your suggestion is not what wouldve been best for this guitar.

If the nibs were the full height of the frets, I would tend to agree that they should be saved. But those nibs appear to be worn or worked down severely to where they no longer serve as a bevel to the fret end. That required you to file an additional bevel on the end of the fret which further decreased the effective fret width.

But I understand the collector's mentality, which often is not based on logic. During my 40 years of repairing and building guitars I have had to turn a number of clients away when they had unrealistic expectations.

still a newbie... I had to look up "Nibs" cause I wasn't sure what you were saying... Please correct me if I am wrong but nibs are extensions on the binding that cover the fret ends (for whatever purpose? aesthetics only?) but in this case I am wondering if there really were nibs, or if what you see is just what's left of the binding when someone callously scalloped the fret board?

My guess is that the original work was done to level out the divots in the fretboard, not that it makes any difference why it was done.

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A man hears what he wants to hear, and disreguards the rest. Paul Simon