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Hi guys,
Newbie here, thanks in advance for your assistance !

I have a '62 reissue strat that I want to refret with jumbo EVO 57110 fret wire that is 110 x 57, tang depth .075. The depth of the current fret slots is around .060 to accommodate the existing original vintage fretwire. The rosewood board is kinda thin (about .125 at the very edges) compared to other boards I've seen, and am concerned about deepening the slots further.

Would deepening the slots to .08 compromise the integrity of the neck ? Anyone do this on one of these before ? Should I grind down the fretwire tang to .06 ? Or just go ahead and not worry about it ?

Thanks !

i personally would just go ahead and deepen the slots, but if you end up having to get down to bare maple when you dress the fret ends, it might complicate things with regards to touching up the finish while maintaining the right color tint etc

Should be a 7.25" radius. If you don't mess up at the edges you should be fine.

Make yourself a depth gauge and don't go any deeper than needed on the edges. File or flatten the tang barbs on the new wire to make a depth gauge.

Confirm slot width/tang are good first.

Just in case someone wants to know, I successfully refretted the strat, and wound up grinding down the fretwire a bit to make it work.
The slots were as deep as I was comfortable cutting them... around .075 or so, and the rosewood board was too thin in my opinion to cut them deeper. So I ground off about .01 off the tang of the EVO gold jumbo fretwire, using an oscillating drum sander. It worked perfectly, very fast, and in no time I had about 5' of fretwire ground down. In preparation, I ran a felt pen along the edge of the tang very carefully, as a depth mark, to make a consistent width mark of about .01" or so on the tang end, and then ground that mark off. Smoothed the rough edge a bit with sandpaper, then cleaned and radiused the wire.
Just thought I'd let you know it is possible. The oscillating drum sander was the key; no heat generated from the grinding, and very fast.

Nice!

As safe solution that worked like a charm.

Hopefully you didn't grind away any of the barb, sounds like you didn't. The larger bead is stiffer and requires all the barb to really hold the fret down nicely.

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