Defretting the Tobias, Part I

After the arrival of the new Lakland, the ole Tobias Growler 4 was in need of a little love. I have been wanting to play fretless more, and the 35" unlined 6-string that I have is just a little too far of a stretch from a fretted 34" 4-string for me to make the jump back and forth. With that thought, the Tobias Defretting project was born!

After reading quite a bit about defretting from the fine folks at talkbass.com and a great tutorial by CharlesArms (http://www.geocities.com/charlesarms/), I decided to take the plunge. Here is a step by step of how it went!

The first step was taking the frets out of the Tobias. Now these frets had a good 10+ years of grime on them, and I had no illusion that this would be easy. I heated each fret individually, and then pulled them out slowly with a flat-headed nail clipper. This is one of those techniques that you get better with over time; after 5 frets or so I had a better feel for how long to heat it, etc. I actually found that if I heated the fret around 20 seconds, I would start to see some of the oil from the wood start to show small bubbles around the fret. Once I got to this point, removing the fret was cake!

Here is a nice picture of the fretboard after fret removal. You can see that the frets definitely "left their mark". The area of the board that was underneith the fret where it overhangs onto the fretboard the most nicked/splintered up.

And here we have the removed frets, 24 strong!










After the initial fret removal, I gave it a nice sanding to smooth out the protusions where the frets came out. I used a medium to high grit sandpaper (320) at this stage. Notice the pacifier in the background... this is not a required tool for the job.






After the fretboard was smoothed to my satisfaction, I used some 1/64 birch to fill the fret holes. I actually had some 1/32 at first, but it was just too big. The 1/64 actually fit perfect with no gap; nice & snug. I had to radius the bottom of the birch to match the contour of the bottom of the grooves in the fretboard. This took a lot of trial and error; I just kept making minor adjustments and hand-fit each piece until I could see that both ends of the filler were flush in the fret gap.

I used some fast-setting epoxy gel to seat the birch into the holes, but I made sure and dry-fit each of them first. After an hour to let the epoxy set, I started shaving them down with a box cutter very carefully. I didnt get it flush, but just worked it down until it was close enough to sand.


More to come in Part II!