latestarter
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- Nov 9, 2009
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Well, not really a mod, but just a way of improving a situation.
I've mentioned it before so I thought I'd take a quick shot and show what I mean. This is a 66/67 ES-335. Narrow nut. The guitar sounds great but I wanted a bit more room to move at the head stock end.
Using my technique below I have the nut string spread at 36mm centre to centre E strings. My R9 is 36.5mm. I have no falling off the ends of the frets or the like. It feels great to play and I have used a tall-ish wire (StewMac 100/50).
1. Prep the fret board properly. Because we want to use as much width as we can you'll want to level out the nibs of any are left.
2. Do your standard fret slot clean and prep work.
3. Do a standard fret over binding (undercut) refret.
4. Cut the ends off the frets but do not angle inwards....just go flush.
5. Carefully with your single cut file level the edges almost vertically at the bottom end and eventually angle the file up as you head towards the pickup end of things.
6. You should end up with only a slightly angled end for the first 5-7 frets. Because some binding is very worn, this can be challenging. I would do each fret end piece by peice if that was the case. This guitar didn't have too much wear so it was relatively easy.
Hopefully this all makes sense...to me it's a great way to enjoy these later 60's ES's and SG's. I do recommend using string size 10 and up for this sort of set up...keeps things a bit tighter.
I've mentioned it before so I thought I'd take a quick shot and show what I mean. This is a 66/67 ES-335. Narrow nut. The guitar sounds great but I wanted a bit more room to move at the head stock end.
Using my technique below I have the nut string spread at 36mm centre to centre E strings. My R9 is 36.5mm. I have no falling off the ends of the frets or the like. It feels great to play and I have used a tall-ish wire (StewMac 100/50).
1. Prep the fret board properly. Because we want to use as much width as we can you'll want to level out the nibs of any are left.
2. Do your standard fret slot clean and prep work.
3. Do a standard fret over binding (undercut) refret.
4. Cut the ends off the frets but do not angle inwards....just go flush.
5. Carefully with your single cut file level the edges almost vertically at the bottom end and eventually angle the file up as you head towards the pickup end of things.
6. You should end up with only a slightly angled end for the first 5-7 frets. Because some binding is very worn, this can be challenging. I would do each fret end piece by peice if that was the case. This guitar didn't have too much wear so it was relatively easy.
Hopefully this all makes sense...to me it's a great way to enjoy these later 60's ES's and SG's. I do recommend using string size 10 and up for this sort of set up...keeps things a bit tighter.