Hardness of fretwire

[straylight]

I've been using inexpensive Boston branded fretwire on builds for my own use and for friends that are paying in favours and suchlike. it's been ok, notably it doesn't mark when I pound it into an ebony fretboard with a brass hammer. I'm doing a comission job so I thought I'd go upmarket and use Jescar nickel silver. I know it's not super-hard evo gold or stainless, but it's really soft in comparison to the cheap Boston i've been using. There are slight marks where I've pounded it into a fairly soft fretboard. Quite frankly I'm disappointed, the cheap fretwire is way harder. I don't know whether the Jescar nickel silver exists only to sell the Evo gold and the Stainless Steel but the only sifter wire I've found has been no-name soft brass fretwire for nylon strung guitars.

I think I'm going to get a guitar's worth of Evo and see how close I can get to a repeatable test for hardness compared to the cheap stuff I've been using to great success in bulk.

Anyone else have some useful data on what's decently hard without being tool-destroyingly hard or so hard it takes forever to level, dress and crown? I'm wary of going to stainless and destroying my rather nice tools over the coarse of a few fretjobs

I play with a fairly rapid vibrato as do the guitarists I work with, I think it's a playing style we have in common and we absolutely destroy guitars with soft frets. The boston nickel silver is holding up so far but the longest its been in anything is 18 months. 

[gitpiddler]

I read something back before I did my first fret job. EVH said he toured Fender and saw that they put them in from the side instead of down. It made sense and it's always stuck with me. I like tall and skinny, for as they wear, the intonation doesn't change much. They are easier to shape too.
The strings should skate across the frets as they vibrate primarily perpendicular to the board. As you're picking harder, concentrate on pushing the strings toward the board instead of the floor, your frets will thank you.

Classical teacher taught me that one. Turns out it works for electrics too. Scotty Moore told Jeff Beck "Get better tone and you're there. Volume you don't need."

[reTrEaD]

Jun 1, 2018 20:36:47 GMT -5 straylight said:

I've been using inexpensive Boston branded fretwire on builds for my own use and for friends that are paying in favours and suchlike. it's been ok, notably it doesn't mark when I pound it into an ebony fretboard with a brass hammer. I'm doing a comission job so I thought I'd go upmarket and use Jescar nickel silver. I know it's not super-hard evo gold or stainless, but it's really soft in comparison to the cheap Boston i've been using. There are slight marks where I've pounded it into a fairly soft fretboard. Quite frankly I'm disappointed, the cheap fretwire is way harder. I don't know whether the Jescar nickel silver exists only to sell the Evo gold and the Stainless Steel but the only sifter wire I've found has been no-name soft brass fretwire for nylon strung guitars.

I think I'm going to get a guitar's worth of Evo and see how close I can get to a repeatable test for hardness compared to the cheap stuff I've been using to great success in bulk.

Anyone else have some useful data on what's decently hard without being tool-destroyingly hard or so hard it takes forever to level, dress and crown? I'm wary of going to stainless and destroying my rather nice tools over the coarse of a few fretjobs

I play with a fairly rapid vibrato as do the guitarists I work with, I think it's a playing style we have in common and we absolutely destroy guitars with soft frets. The boston nickel silver is holding up so far but the longest its been in anything is 18 months. 

I wonder if making your own hardness test methodology will actually be useful. Most vendors do perform hardness tests on the different fret alloys they use and you can probably get that information if you contact them. Some, like Warmoth state the typical hardness of their frets.

I really doubt stainless is going to 'destroy' your tools but obviously harder materials will take longer to work and will cause faster wear.

The most common method used for measuring the hardness of fret materials seems to be Vickers although some vendors use Rockwell. The difference appears to be Rockwell uses the starting height of the indenter as a reference then determines the depth of the indentation after load by measuring the difference in height. Vickers measures the width (then calculates the area) of the residual impression after the indenter/load have been applied.

Here's a video of the Vickers method.



The Jescar stainless alloy Warmoth uses results in HV 300 (Vickers)
Their Nickel-free copper alloy results in HV 250
Their "Nickel-silver" alloy results in HV 170

[b4nj0]

"Stainless-Steel" is a broad term. You can get what I call stainless iron which exhibits ferrous (as in magnetic) qualities all the way to "aircraft grade" (sic) Stainless-Steel like 316 (and the like) which is not magnetic.

I once loaned a pair of "Gilbow" 14" right cutting "tin snips" to a work colleague who proceeded to cut some Stainless-Steel strangle hold banding to length. He turned them into something akin to dressmakers's pinking shears. I had to return them to the makers to be re-ground at the correct 80° angle.
That taught me a lesson I'll never forget. First never to lend out hand tools to idiots and secondly to find ways to work with Stainless-Steel that respects your tools. There were those I worked with that didn't care because at the end of the day it's just a tool, but everyone knew what Stainless-Steel meant. Monel was even worse.

I have two Warmoth necks- one "Strat" type and one "Tele" type, both with Stainless-Steel frets and I love them, but the "Strat" type I paid to have set up because the quarter-sawn neck didn't respond very well (as in not at all) to truss rod tweaks. I didn't tell the "luthier" that it had Stainless-Steel frets... I have fret end nippers that I would not want to use on Stainless-Steel frets without establishing the degree of chromium in the mix. Large scale drilling of Stainless-Steel resulted in more drill bit sharpening. Does anyone do that these days?

The foregoing is based on personal experience rather than science. Rather like plunging one's hands into the open wounds. It should not be taken as my version of gospel.

e&oe...

[cynical1]

Greetings -

Installing frets, while it looks straight forward, is a skill that takes years to master and can still go South on you...trust me.

First off, you don't mention the profile you're using from either vendor. This can be telling, as if you don't cut the correct slot size for your frets and\or don't over bend them correctly based on fingerboard radius...you can have a situation that no matter how many times you hit the damn things they'll never seat correctly.

Typically, if you're having a problem with distortion after installing the new frets those are the two most common causes. Those, and perhaps you had two bowls of Wheaties that morning, but I digress.

By "over-bending" the wire, I'm talking about the radius you bend the fretwire at in relationship to the neck fingerboard radius.  For example, if you have a 16" radius on the neck you'll want to bend your fretwire to a 14-1/2" to 15" radius on nickel wire, but on maybe 15-7/8" to 15-15/16" depending on fret profile.  The idea is to have the edges of the fretwire bottom out before the middle in the slot when installing.  If you cut your slot to the right width and depth the fret will snug up cleanly without a high spot at the edges.  And typically you install the fret with one blow.  You can do the tap-tap-tap thing, but that's how you wind up with wobbly or high frets, as each blow can contribute to a distorted fret profile...and low spots from the hammer marks.

I hammered frets in for years. My preference was a coated deadblow hammer with a replaceable brass insert on one side of the head. Looked something like this:



After doing this for years I discover fret cawls:

img1.stewmac.com/product/images/2832/Fret_Press_Caul_with_5_Fret_Press_Inserts.jpg

These can work in a small press, or even a drill press since the chuck only needs to be able to accept the 3/8" shaft out of the cawl. Once you use one of these things you'll never hammer another fret.

In order to steer you onto the correct path, I'll need to know a little more about how you go about doing a refret job. I.E.: Fret profile used, how you remove the old frets, how you cut\clean up existing fret slots, the amount of bend you use on the fretwire in relation to the fingerboard radius and how you stabilize the neck when installing your frets.

For reference, the EVO wire I use comes from LMII:

\
LMII Gold EVO fretwire

Happy Trails

Cynical One

[straylight]

I assure you it's nothing to do with the slot widths. If anything the Jescar wire had an easy time of it and went in easy. I think the Squier slots are cut a little looser than most. Depending on how I think the frets went in I'll either work them out with a set of ground-down end cutters that serve as fret pullers, or I'll get an old soldering iron tip that's been cut to fit the fret nicely, set the iron to an appropriate heat and gently heat the fret until the glue gives up and then tweak the fret out with the same set of end cutters. I've got a home made fret bender rig that's two pairs of free floating bearings, one of which is height adjustable and one set of glued up bearings attached to a crank, pretty standard stuff. Small brass hammer, I think with a 4oz head. It's dainty enough to do the high frets. I think there's a sealey dead-blow much like the orange thing pictured amongst the motorbike tools but it's not as dainty or as nice to use. I've got a set of gauged saw blades, I go a size smaller on a soft fretboard and a size larger on ebony, and a little 5-tooth saw blade on a stick thing for cleaning out fret slots. Seems to work ok. I usually use some hot hide glue in a syringe to act as a lubricant on the way in and for it's vibrational transfer properties. I'm not particularly sure if it does any good but it's much easier to redo than when someone has used CA. Certainly when making plywood out of veneers hide and CA glues come out on top for resonant properties.

I've seen the fender sideways method. If you have the kit it works well and the frets go in much closer to level and are much harder to get out. It's quite plant heavy though and not really tabletop appropriate.

Most of my fear of stainless fretwire is from hearing Ben Crowe and co at Crimson whinge about it being hard work and wearing tools excessively. As I buy their files I might be inclined to heed their warnings. Particularly as they have a habit of taking orders and not shipping for months. Although to their credit they do split out the oils and dyes they have in and ship them really fast.

I tend to have Boston in 1.4mm high in 2.4 and 2.7mm wide and 1.1 high by 2mm wide, all on an 0.5 mm tang, 18% Nickel Silver on hand most of the time. There's some fairly fine very yellow brass fretwire of unknown brand that is well into the too soft category that might be ok on a classical but I daren't risk it. I should clarify: the first guitar I put the boston fretwire on was 18 months ago and it still looks pristine, it's not the case that we're killing the frets in 18 months. OK, I did that to my first squier, but that was practising several hours a day every day with just the one guitar. But that was a long time ago now.

This time around it was Jescar 55090 which is a slightly narrower 2.28 wide by 1.4mm high on a tang width that's near as dammit to of 0.5mm. It's been really easy to edge, bevel, level and crown (although i've a few frets left to do yet) and I can see why it's popular. It's very nice to work with. It's just not as hard as the not particularly expensive Boston wire and I was quite surprised. 

However much i'd like to have a vickers hardness testing rig in my workshop, I'm not sure it's appropriate given my workshop is essentially a re-purposed kitchen table, a workmate in the back porch and whatever space i can find on the computer/electronics/music desk. And there's a whole load of plant I'd buy first if space were not at a premium. But how trustworthy are manufacturer's claims? I don't believe the fuel economy figures VW claim for my care are even remotely achievable. The exhaust system verified by an independent magazine to add 10.4 bhp to my motorbike means it now actually achieves the manufacturer's claimed power output. I'm fairly sure that the world of guitars is not exempt from bovine proctologists.

[cynical1]

Stainless anything will eat your tooling alive. I've done a few stainless fret jobs and have retired from the practice. For the extra money I had to charge it wasn't worth it to people and they voted with their wallets. I honestly don't see the benefit to stainless frets for 85%-90% of the players out there. It took me about 20 years to wipe out the frets on my old Peavey bass...and I didn't put flatwounds on it until about 7 years ago.

I did like the EVO gold fretwire from LMII. I did a bass and a guitar with it and found it only slightly harder to work with than nickel wire. It also looks sweet when polished, especially on a darker fretboard.  As an aside, I've always found the LMII fretwire to be of consistent quality and accurate tolerances.

I've had a lot of tools over the years, but never owned or saw the need for a hardness testing rig. IMHO, the wad of cash necessary to buy one would probably flush out all the small tools a guitarsmith would ever need...for a lifetime...

Actually, if you're looking to spend some cash, I think you'd find the fret caul mentioned in one of the previous posts might be a smart investment if you do a lot of necks. The actual caul can be used in a small press if you have one. I use my drill press with a fixture I made that fits into the drill vice. Works like a charm and the odds of a distorted or high fret goes down to next to nothing.

And since the flood my shop have become more of a guerrilla operation. I've seen tech's with a full shop turn out garbage work, so never apologize for your shop.

Happy Trails -

Cynical One

[straylight]

There are worse things than stainless, like the super-hard tool steel bolt extractor I had to remove from a motorcycle frame because someone thought it would be a good idea to replace corrosion prone bolts made of easy-to-drill cheese with 12.9 bolts without chasing the threads first...

There are a LOT of tools out there that don't meet expectations, and I'm deeply suspicious of the luthier tools racket, there's a lot of things out there that are re-marketed junk and really good edged tools that aren't unjustifiably expensive are even harder to find than spanners that aren't a liability.  

[cynical1]

Yeah, engineers...amazing what 4 straight years of advanced alcohol intake can produce...

I agree that some of the tools offered by the larger vendors for "luthiers" can appear to make all their wares appear dubious. Having lost all of my tools about a decade ago, I can tell you there are quite a few I miss dearly. Files and saws especially. Having spent decades accumulating nut files, nut seating files, crowing files, fret cutting saws and jigs...etc...it hurt when they spent 6 weeks under water and became a Petri dish for growing rust cultures...

The cardinal rule for any tool is how much effort and time it saves you. Most of the jigs and fixtures sold can be built for a fraction of the cost. For about $15.00 you can build an adjustable fixture for making full pocket neck shims that only requires a crescent wrench, vise and hand belt sander to used effectively and effectively. I would encourage you more in this direction. Buy the precision store bought tools as you can, but use the time in between to start building up a stock of jigs and fixtures for various tasks. With a drill press with a good table and a bench vise you can build dozens of fixtures for everything from thickness sanding, neck screw holes, tuner holes, whammy of your choice locating, template making...yeah, it's a long list...

Happy Trails

Cynical1