Fly Fret Gluing - Chapter 1 is a description of the development and advantages of the Fly fret system and the Fly in general. Parker patent to reference: patents.google.com/patent/US5...
I daresay this is an example of a happy accident for all of us guitar players that such a brilliant mind hasn't ended up in NASA or something but in guitar making. Hats off to you Mr.Parker, this is so inspiring! PS: That glass-beads-spacer thing is... Well, I can imagine the process, but in my mind it's as far from luthiery as it could possibly be. Which makes it cool AF
Ha! What an interesting comment! If you only knew how allergic I am to reporting to anyone, you’d know that I wouldn’t have lasted in any industry without a bodyguard! The glass bead / grains of sand spacer thing is quite a common way to insure that the adhesive isn’t ejected from the glue joint by clamping pressure, and that an optimal film thickness is achieved. BTW, the dreaded failure mode of this kind of “too thin” or “all squeezed out” is called a “starved joint”. Since guitars and other stringed instruments are mostly made of wooden parts joined with adhesives, the whole art of bonding this to that is a central method/skill to all builders, so any adhesive adventure is naturally right straight up the alley of Lutherie!
I don’t even know why this popped up in my feed but it’s absolutely amazing. I’d like to share my story if there are any other nerds here that might find it interesting. I’ll try to not make it a novel. I’ve been designing and building my own instruments for a while now that are fiddles that feature frets. I’ve resisted the traditional fretting methods and have been told by other builders that it’s very difficult to bend standard frets over the tightened radius of a bowed instrument. So I initially was building very cheap and rustic things using 1/4-round moulding straight from the Home Depot as a fingerboard because it already has the perfect radius and perfect width for 2-3 strings(I was inspired by the erhu and morin khuur fiddles). I then would tie round jewelry wire around it with a knot on the bottom side and install risers to hold the fretboard high enough off the neck to leave clearence for the knots. This worked for a while, especially when I was using the “cigar box guitar” approach to building the bodies. But as my woodworking improved I felt that the look of the knots were cheapening the overall aesthetic and I was looking for ways to hide them. I’ve gotten some good results now and again but it doesn’t always work out as well as I like and I’m always brainstorming new ideas anyway. I began using Sendcutsend to get my custom hardware laser cut and the results are amazing(I no longer use a hinge as a tailpiece). But then I thought, maybe I can have frets cut to a custom shape that can basically “snap” onto the fretboard, leaving me with a zero-clearance joint of the fretboard and neck. So I’ve attempted multiple variations on this idea and still don’t have one I’m 100% set on. But it’s my constant obsession throughout the day. I’m frying up your chicken tenders thinking about my next fret design that could be the one I’ve dreamt of.
Check out Mark Wood’s cool electric violins, I met him on 48th st in the late ‘70’s, when he was doing some very creative work. A hard rocker, he was performing on a 7 string fretted violin he designed and built. No problem for him to bend the frets, so just go for it, the regular frets are gonna work fine. Your inventions sound fantastic, keep on doing! electricviolinshop.com/collections/viper-violins?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw-ai0BhDPARIsAB6hmP7aorVT09I4plxGenfM9HGTpicwYycssv3vleXjz8HelsAeHKJkqm0aAj8HEALw_wcB
@@kenparkerarchtoppery9440 I’m very familiar with those, for sure! Yeah, I’ll try frets eventually but I have a lot of fun trying new things. I feel like I’m so close to something really cool with it. Thanks for the encouragement!
Probably the most interesting video I've seen on RU-vid in years. Thank you for sharing this!!! I especially loved hearing about the development challenges. Cheers
The exacting lengths that you went through is a perfect subject for me as I had read about the frets being glued on, and have wondered about the specifics of the process. Unveiled😢 at last! And the story of the name and Fishmans involvement is glorious! Fourth at 3:33 and one to go 😅. A night owl by nature but this is a treat to sleep in for.
I had the absolute pleasure of owning an original Parker Fly deluxe (Emerald Green), a delight to play. Some day I decided to trade it fro a Les Paul custome, and have regretted it every day since. So much so that Im looking for another. Ken You designed the best instrument i ever owned and which you would again! Its an Icon
In 1974, a nice young guy sold me a clean, excellent running condition, rust-free 1964 white Impala convertible with red leather interior and a small block V8 for $1. He knew I was tight for cash, and somehow liked me enough to do me this favor, as I needed something to drive. Gas was getting pricey, and he decided he could find a better vehicle for his 45 minute commute, something that didn’t leak in a downpour and got better mileage. I sold the car some months later, and have longed for it ever since. That’s one of only a few regrets. Although I feel your pain, You, my friend, can buy a fly on eBay for about the same $ as our original manufacturing cost. Who knows, (?) there might yet be another stab at a nouveau guitar.
This is truly invaluable. How often do we get to hear the Sorcerer's Secrets? And from someone as humble as he is utter genius. I'm so grateful for the fruits of your relentless invention and tireless labor. signed, Fly Owner.
Fascinating. I’ve always known your guitars were “outside the box” creations, but never knew how far outside. Cool stuff. Thanks for sharing this. On a side note, whenever I think of your guitars I think of Vernon Reed’s extremely cool signature model. Saw Living Color warm up for the Rolling Stones, from the floor of the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. It be was the B Stones’ “Steel Wheels Tour.” Vernon was definitely rockin your guitar on their “Cult of Personality!” Good times.
Great memories in the way back machine Ken. My Mahogany Nite Fly is holding up well. I have to get you some photo's of the weird delamination of the fingerboard at the nut area.
Hello Ken! I need a stainless second fret for my original deluxe - no tremolo bar. Apart from that it is in immaculate condition. 8^) I note the Ca, accelerator, ->cannot be shipped to Australia 8-/, tooling and method from vid2 - can do! I am just missing the stainless fret itself. This is NOT a complaint! It spent its first ten years in the tropics - ANY frets would have a hard time in such a humid environment. I have my own jewellery workshop so I am not afraid to take complete responsibility for the remount. (given this excellent information, thank you).
Please email me, and I can make this easy for you. You don’t need accelerator, just thin, fresh Cyanoacrylate glue. Best bet might be your local hobby shop.
@@kenparkerarchtoppery9440 I will Ken thank you SO much you are a true genius and an absolute gentleman which the entire industry also notes you as. Kind regards.
OK, so maybe I wouldn’t think of 304 passivated stainless as “conventional steel”, but OK, close enough. Actually, we are constrained by the properties of the several alloys that the metallurgists have settled on as desirable, which, in the case of 304 means pretty spectacular corrosion-resistance as well as great stiffness and strength numbers, topped of by superior surface hardness due to the manufacturing process of “rolling” (squashing between two solid carbide shaped wheels) wire from round to half-round.
Been looking for in depth info on this process for about 5 years since I found some of these fretboard blanks on e bay and bought then mostly because they were just a cool/unique item…but now? It’s time to order some cotter pins…my idea is to use a thin substrate under them rout shallow channels for frets. No where near as impressive as original concept but might enhance stability and ease of clean installation w epoxy…..my high-level-hackery solution haha…,
i glue in stainless steel frets, and cut the slots just wide enough to press them in by hand. stainless is so hard if i hammer them in they pop up like playing whack a mole on a sea-saw. nickle silver is alot softer and maluable and they fit in the slots withh friction alot better
We’ll sure they do, when you strike a piece of metal, the surface gets work-hardened, and then changes shape, and it’s all downhill from there. The method would be to lightly over bend, and then press or very lightly tap home with a plastic face hammer in order to avoid this condition, which is un-recoverable-from, if you know what I’m saying.
I’m a composites engineer as my day job. And I was wondering did you ever consider compression moulding these in there entirety using a thermoset compound ? For example a carbon web polyester smc or bmc? Then you could mould the fret in as an insert for example. It’s very dimensionally stable. And would make a fret board take, I would estimate around 4 minutes to bake. And with a fairly modest press you’d be able to probably make 4 at a time. Could be that in a morning you’d have 100 ready to use boards. Which are storable stable and already in a finished state. ? Just food for thought. I’m an amateur guitar builder myself and often think this stuff through. Although budgetary restraint obviously apply 😂
Thanks for these suggestions! I think your idea of molding frets into/onto a board with these materials would probably work well, but in order to get the strength needed, the part would be considerably heavier than the design we used for the Parker Guitars instruments. I decided 4 decades ago that polyester resin wasn’t a good choice for instrument making, and I doubt that I’ll ever feel differently. It’s too “gooey” for my taste, and so has lots of unwanted damping, apart from being much lower strength compared with the best epoxies. I know that lots of high volume parts are made with these molding processes, and they perform well for lots of parts. I don’t know much about designing for these materials, but I have always been keen to have control over fiber orientation, both as a woodworker, and also in composites. The random fiber orientation of these materials seems like a bad use of fiber reinforcement especially as I have tried by best to use as little composite material as I could get way with, partly because it is so much heavier than wood. It does seem to be a fertile area for exploration, as you suggest, and I’m currently designing some items to which this class of random fiber oriented pre-preg materials could apply. I don’t like using polyester resins in my work, as my experiments with them vs epoxies 40+ years ago led me to conclude that they sounded way less wonderful than crisp epoxies cured at elevated d temperatures.
Some of the later US Music Flies had tang frets. You can usually tell them because the headstock has a flair just behind the nut so it hangs on a regular hanger.
@@micah_noelI’ll need to visit my pal and examine it again. I swear it had tangs, the noteworthy aspect being that they were the most perfectly flushed tangs I’d ever seen. I presumed at the time that Parker executed tanged fret installation superior to anything I’d seen, but perhaps it was just an extremely good re-fret. Until I see it again it’ll remain a mystery to me as to whether it was imagined.
Who knows what the nut jobs that bought my company did, but I can assure you that under the original team I put together, we never cut a fret slot from 1993 - 2004.
So you used micro as mechanical spacer for the adhesive. Probably the first (maybe the only) time it was used as such. Also - frets harder than the hubs of hell? Impossible to level and polish.
Using glass beads as an adhesive spacer is very common. 304 is not very hard(even with this sort of processing), normal frets are just really soft. There are several industries that routinely polish materials much harder(knives are one example).
1) glass beads or other carefully sized mineral particles are standard issue in the adhesive industry, as they insure the correct thickness of the “bond line”. You can think of this bond line as a laminate that just happens to get permanently involved with the surfaces of both materials. 2) The hardness of hard-rolled 304 stainless is a little difficult to measure exactly, but just let’s say that is substantially softer than the hardness of a file, which is normally about 60 on the Rockwell C Scale of hardness, which is to say, very nearly as hard as steel can get. This means that the 304 stainless frets are certainly machinable by the usual fret dressing tools, although it will require more force to keep the files “in the cut” when leveling and re-crowning, and also the abrasive papers used to remove the file marks will wear out more quickly. I assure you that this is nothing like “impossible”, and more like a bit more time consuming, but really, no big deal. 3) I’m happy to report that this is rarely required!
I think it's pretty unfortunate that this method has gotten a bad reputation. If a fret was lifting on the edges of a normal guitar, most people would just say "oh it must have been done poorly", yet most don't keep that same mindset when it comes to this. Poor execution has killed so many fantastic ideas that should've otherwise replaced the outdated technology that still dominates the market.
Who needs a car, I’ve got horses?!?!??! Thanks! It’s true, and new technology nearly always has its’ teething problems. . Early cars might look cool to us, but they were anything but dependable, being happy to catch fire or fall apart anytime you went out for a spin. Now we take them for granted, just like we do metal frets instead of frets made from small intestines! Without some sideways thinking and folding in new materials, things don’t evolve, which, I’ll say is what we're here to do!
