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Permalink Reply by Tom T on March 11, 2015 at 5:07pm

Take a good stainless steel straight edge and lay it from the first fret to at least the 12th and see how severe the bow actually is. If it is not too severe, you could try leveling the frets with a good, long sanding block. take a sharpie and color the top of all the frets so you can see when all frets show signs of contact with the sanding block. You can then smooth and polish the top of the frets with something like 1000 grit.

It all depends on how badly things are bowed. you can't sand the frets away, but you can level them then try lowering the bridge to reduce action height up around the 12th.

You should be able to get things sorted out enough to make the instrument a decent player. Just don't get over aggressive with the sanding block.

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Permalink Reply by Richey Kay on March 11, 2015 at 7:07pm

Unlucky Tom, this happened to me a few times when I started making these. Any chance you could post a few pictures to this topic? We might be able to recommend some steps to avoid it in future.

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Permalink Reply by Dan Sleep on March 12, 2015 at 1:40am

This may help a bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ3F7-aXMiw

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Permalink Reply by Bluesheart on March 12, 2015 at 9:17am

Great tips in that vid Dan!

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Permalink Reply by Tom Gilreath on March 16, 2015 at 3:02am

Thanks for the info, fellows!

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