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Anyone have much experience with bar frets and their consistency? Seeing that I'm leveling and recrowning all the time anyway I'm thinking of experimenting if I can find them. From one source it seems they come in a coil which wouldn't be good.. ....Clinton

The material is extruded so they should be very consistant in height and width as raw material. you could easly check the dimensions with a caliper.

Now I assume your slot your FB in the flat then radius them depending on how you radisus your FB it is pussible to add a small amoune of taper into the length or some tilt to the conical radius which can cause inconsistancey in the finished depth of the slot aofter radius. if you are hand slotting ther could be some incosistancy there or in the press of the fret it's selt or in the leveling of the frets. I seriously doubt that there is much variance in a given batch at all in the hight of the bar fret wire if purchased from the same vendor becaue of it being extruded through a dye.

Fretting with bar frets is a whole different technique, it's easy to end up with a gigantic back bow in the neck. Actually that is kind of the purpose of bar frets, they really stiffen a neck. Ideally you want to have a few different gauges and not fret serially. I've only seen it come in fairly straight 2" length.

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Laurent Brondel
West Paris, Maine - USA
http://www.laurentbrondel.com/

Bar fret stock generally comes in lengths of about 18" and is already radiused to approx. 16". At least that's the way mine comes. It's available in widths from about.049 to .060. As far as the height goes, you determine that after you install the frets by filing them to the desired height, then rounding them over. As Laurent said, it's not for the faint-hearted, particularly if you're using an ebony rod in lieu of a truss rod. If you're using an adjustable truss rod, then the procedure is greatly simplified, as you don't have to rely on the frets so much as part of the structural stability of the neck.

If you're converting an existing guitar, my advice would be to replace the fretboard. Trying to reslot an existing fingerboard with t-frets would be way more trouble than starting with a new one.

Frank Ford has an excellent tutorial on his website. It's a refret, but the steps are the same.

Good luck.

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Jimmy Caldwell
http://www.caldwellguitars.com

Call me crazy, but I was thinking that bar frets would not introduce as much backbow as the "T" type frets for they wouldn't be "forced" into the slot. If bar frets were consistant in width then it's a matter of finding the right saw for a snug fit. Does anyone use these on thier builds? Clinton

Clinton,

You can certainly cut a .050" slot and put a .050" bar fret in with a little CA on the ends. With a properly adjusted truss rod, they will work fine in that application as long as your are not trying to correct a backbow situation that can't be addressed by the truss rod. A single action truss rod will not correct backbow. If you have a double action truss rod, that works for either front bow (caused by string tension) or backbow (generally caused by excessive moisture in the neck).The backbow situation is mentioned because typically bar frets were used in Martin guitars prior to 1935 and these guitars had only a piece of ebony for neck reinforcement. Bar frets of varying widths can be used to correct this situation when there is no adjustable rod. In this application, they are very much a structural component of the neck much more so than a standard T-fret installation.

If you've not played a guitar with bar frets, you might try one first. It's a whole different feel than T-frets and one that takes some getting used to. It has to do with the proportions of the bar frets relative to the T-frets we're so accustomed to. Generally bar fret profiles will be somewhere around .050 wide and .040 tall, whereas most T-frets are about twice as wide as they are high. It's just a different feel. I happen to like it, but some people can't get used to it.

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Jimmy Caldwell
http://www.caldwellguitars.com