dfrattaroli
New member
Hey guys,
Thought maybe some of you guys would be interested in this. I recently picked up a new RG927. While it's a very nice guitar, mine was in need of a level right out of the box. I took care of that this weekend with excellent results. If you've ever considered doing this yourself, check the pics and notes below. Happy to answer any questions you may have.
Dave
1) Here you see the guitar taped off with the strings removed and the trem blocked. I also adjusted the truss rod so that the neck was flat.
2) I also colored the top of every fret with a black Sharpie. I wrote down the number of all the frets where there was "rocking". I used a Stew-Mac fret rocker over 3 frets and a time. If it rocked. That meant the middle fret was higher than the adjacent two. I had many of these from the 23rd fret down to the 3rd. Here, you can see as the frets start to level off. I used a Stew-Mac fret leveller with adhesive 220 grit sand paper. Followed by 320 and 400.
3) Every so often, I would stop levelling and test the frets that had been tagged as "bad". When a fret no longer rocked, I struck it from the list.
4) There were a couple of special cases where I ended up levelling the individual fret with a file. Here's one of them.
5) This is the the file I used for crowning. Yup. Stew-Mac.
6) After the crowning was done, I used a set of 5 erasers to polish the frets. They went from 180 grit to 1000. I followed that up with a quick buffing with 0000 steel wool. Here's the final polish.
7) The fretboard was a bit dry so I conditioned it.
8) Strings back on. Went with .010s. I still have to readjust the spring tension now that I went up a size in strings and I have to lower the action just a bit. But so far, there isn't a single buzz any where.
Thought maybe some of you guys would be interested in this. I recently picked up a new RG927. While it's a very nice guitar, mine was in need of a level right out of the box. I took care of that this weekend with excellent results. If you've ever considered doing this yourself, check the pics and notes below. Happy to answer any questions you may have.
Dave
1) Here you see the guitar taped off with the strings removed and the trem blocked. I also adjusted the truss rod so that the neck was flat.
2) I also colored the top of every fret with a black Sharpie. I wrote down the number of all the frets where there was "rocking". I used a Stew-Mac fret rocker over 3 frets and a time. If it rocked. That meant the middle fret was higher than the adjacent two. I had many of these from the 23rd fret down to the 3rd. Here, you can see as the frets start to level off. I used a Stew-Mac fret leveller with adhesive 220 grit sand paper. Followed by 320 and 400.
3) Every so often, I would stop levelling and test the frets that had been tagged as "bad". When a fret no longer rocked, I struck it from the list.
4) There were a couple of special cases where I ended up levelling the individual fret with a file. Here's one of them.
5) This is the the file I used for crowning. Yup. Stew-Mac.
6) After the crowning was done, I used a set of 5 erasers to polish the frets. They went from 180 grit to 1000. I followed that up with a quick buffing with 0000 steel wool. Here's the final polish.
7) The fretboard was a bit dry so I conditioned it.
8) Strings back on. Went with .010s. I still have to readjust the spring tension now that I went up a size in strings and I have to lower the action just a bit. But so far, there isn't a single buzz any where.
