Awesome job! Detailed and precision. May I ask what you were using as end cutters? i saw the were a bolt cutter design but have never seen them in an end cutter orientation. Thanks.
Hoping you can answer a question. When you refret a guitar, one of the most time-consuming tasks is flattening and recrowning the frets. I have often wondered why fret wire is not available that comes pre-crowned. Would that be a time-saver? What am I missing on this?
The wire does come in usable shape from the package. The issue is that it is very difficult to install all of the new frets level with one another. On this job I ended up having one a bit high right next to one that was unusually low. I decided to level all of the frets, but if you were meticulous on the front end with preparation and waited to glue the frets after seating and adjusting any high frets with hammering, you could get by with only spot leveling with something like the stewmac fret kisser.
The first fret job I attempted to wick very thin CA glue under the seated frets after installing and adjusting. The wicking works fine, but I had a difficult time cleanly removing the CA glue off of the maple fingerboard. I decided to take a different approach on this job by using thick glue while fretting. For me it was worth it to only have to deal with a small amount of squeeze out from the first few frets.
Neither of these have been bad, but I've leveled them anyway to be sure the new frets went in as level as possible up front to potentially reduce the amount of sanding required.
