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I had a chance to put our new Summit fret tang cutter through its paces this past weekend with a refret of a 1970's Ibanez bass in stainless and a compatibility check of available Jescar, Stewart MacDonald, and LMII fret wires with the three insert plates currently available. The tool uses these shaped inserts to cradle and support the wire in the area to be cut, and a sliding stop allows a consistent amount of tang to be trimmed from each end of the fret without further measurement.

Like others here, we use the Stewart MacDonald fret tang nipper for nickel silver, but revert to the older LMII jig to cleanly remove EVO and stainless tangs due to the admonition not to use the Stewmac tools in harder wires. We average about 40 minutes to process a full set of frets in EVO or stainless, including burr removal and tweaking the unsupported crown at the edges for best fit.

We were curious to see how much faster the Summit cutter would be for EVO and stainless, and the bass refret in Jescar FW47095 SS ran about 20 minutes for prep from start to finish. The worst quality cut with the tool was still quite clean, with just a bit of scuffing of the underside of the crown and less than .001" of tang left near the edge of the fret. There as no distortion of the wire or tang of note (the bend in the crown in the photos was done with a pair of fret bending pliers for a better fit over the binding), and the cut - whether through a barb or between - was very clean.





In terms of use, the tool is more easily used by those with larger hands than smaller, although I found no real problems once I developed a technique for using the leverage afforded by the bench edge to generate the extra force needed for cutting stainless tangs. The fret wire locks into the holding jaw nicely when light pressure is applied, so shifting to a two-handed grip was also no issue. The two other luthiers in the shop this past weekend - both with much larger hands than mine - tried cuts in a variety of EVO and stainless wires with no complaints.







Checking against the wires we stock and those I could beg from other shops close by, it appears as though the available inserts cover a reasonable range of wires from Jescar and other vendors, and the table below covers those wires we have checked thus far. If someone here has worked their way through the Dunlop offerings or some of the other wires available, I would be grateful for an assessment and list of other compatible wires. I sent a note to Jescar querying whether additional inserts were forthcoming to handle smaller wires and those sizes that seem to sit squarely in between the ones list - I'll update this note based on what I receive from them.



Thanks to Mr. Frank Ford for suggesting the Summit Fret Tang Cutter as a good option for the job. At $100 for the trimmer with insert 1/2, and $36 each for inserts 3/4 and 5/6. the 20 or so minutes saved on each job buys the tool and full set of inserts in just a half dozen refrets. I hope to be around to update this note once we have a chance to see how well the tool holds up in normal shop use.

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For the times they are a changin'

- Bob Dylan

Nice thorough review Will. It's nice to get honest, real world feedback on tools that can improve the quality of the work we do. Thanks for the time you spent with this.

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jw ( o)===:::

Thanks for the thorough rundown Woodie!

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Pat

Cheers!

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

I had a chance to try out that tool a few months ago and I agree it's a winner. It is definitely on my list for the shop.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

I recently got a pair of the summit nippers too. Specifically for big wire.

I'm very happy with them so far but one modification I'm contemplating is grinding some of the fret holding side off so it can cut more tangent to a tight radius. The last thing I want to do is straighten the very end of a fret.

I found the fit so tight on EVO 057x110 with a tight radius, that I added a .004" piece of tape between the insert and cutter to let it sit all the way down.

The SM nibbler style has a shorter .125" support bed that allows for tweaking the angle of the cut. The Summit's is .375".

Of course the dream would be to have them made with a mild radius. Maybe 16"-20" to match the wire as it comes off the roll. I don't usually flatten the wire for flat boards

I'm not enthusiastic about modding such an expensive tool straight away so I'll probably wait awhile before I do it.

Have you used them for big wire w/ a tight radius yet Woody?


Don't know if these photo's illustrate what I talking about well.

Which LMI tang remover? I recently purchased the LMI jig with the toggle clamp and was unimpressed -- because the end of the fret is unsupported, it removed too much material and frequently unevenly such that all my good work to get a perfectly flat fingerboard goes out the window. I could hand file the nub (after Stew Mac nipper) on nickel/silver wire and keep the bead within .002". The LMII jig removed frequently more than .005 - .007".

Mr. Berkowitz:

Our LMII jig is the older fret tang removal system, which uses a partially jigged file to remove the tang. We get very good results with the system, but it is a little dependent on having a feel for the job. I do not believe the jig is available any longer, but perhaps a call to LMII might result in a lead. The boss has used the newer version and found it to be a poor substitute for the original.



Good results in both EVO and nickel-silver...and stainless, but I don't have a shot handy.





Mr. Farmer:

We have experienced exactly the same issue, but found that by using a slightly smaller insert, there was enough room to slightly rotate the fret (12" radius on the fret in the photo) to avoid having to flatten things for a close-to-flush cut. The wire shown is 110 x 57 EVO trimmed using the #5 (95 x 47) insert...there is about .002" or less tang remaining, which seems to be the limit where a close fit is needed without touching up.

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For the times they are a changin'

- Bob Dylan

Bought one with my last fretwire order a few months ago.
Expensive but more than worth the money.

Brent

I need to do some really fine Mandolin wire for a bound board and thinking of taking the opportunity to get a descent tang removal tool.
Everyone still loving the Summit or should I work to track down the Frank Ford fret tang filing jig?

Will the Summit handle fine Mandolin wire with the smaller insert? (Stew Mac #764 or even old stock Gibson mando wire if I can track it down)

I tend to get a little bit of distortion on the end of thin uke wire with the summit (and other nippers for that matter) so I use the ford filing jig for uke wire. I use flat or 16” radius on uke fretboards and the Ford jig works fine. I’ve read (maybe here can’t remember) that radiused wire can be problematic in the Ford jig. I haven’t had an issue yet on several boards.

FWIW, I use the summit for everything else and it does a fine job.


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So you're saying I'm going to want both...

Well... yeah.

But I was more saying, for thin wire, the Ford jig has worked better for me.


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That nibbler does not work very good on #764. Distorts the heck out of it. I still use it, but have to take 2-3 little nibbles instead of 1 cut. In a typical run of 20 frets, it always destroys 2-3 frets.Then I still have to file the tang to get it clean. For small wire, it's no better than the Stew-Mac one.

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“ The meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away” Pablo Picasso

The older LMI jig is just like the Frank Ford jig, and yes you want one, I have the Summit unit, its useful, and the new LMI jig (junk) my apprentice just used the Frank Ford jig on his Ibanez RT650, 24 fret bound fingerboard with the Jescar Stainless steel 0.110" X ).057" wire and both did a nice job.

For smaller wire like Jescar's 37052 (0.037" x 0.053"), the older LMII fret tang removal jig works nicely. Summit does not have an insert sized for wire with crown width narrower than 0.080", so the cut is poorly supported and leaves quite a bit of distortion. As I mentioned in the initial posts in this thread, we've used the newer LMII jig and found it to be a poor substitute for Mr. Ford's jig.

For small mandolin wire, there is always the option to trim with a good fret nipper and clean up with a file - a small piece of scrap ply with a tiny 'V' cut makes a nice holder.

_________________
For the times they are a changin'

- Bob Dylan

I have the newer LMI fret tang removal jig. I find that it works, but that it doesn’t provide any better result than just using good fret tang nippers. The nippers are faster by far. So, back to the nippers for me. Lesson learned.

And while I was able to get the LMI jig to work fine, I can see how it has a lot of potential to not work right. So, it takes longer to do the job, it has greater potential for not working right, and it costs money. Not a good choice. LMI gets many things right, but this one is not my favorite.

I had the SM nippers which worked great on NS and EVO (gave them away). Had the Frank Ford set up which worked well on SS but was slow and tended to mar the top of the fret a little (sold). I have the Summit cutter which is quick and does a decent job but hurts my hand after a single fretboards worth. As mentioned above using the bench for advantage could solve the fatigue issue.

In that I only use SS frets I came up with this. I do keep a pot of water near by to cool the fret after the cut. Works like a champ.

M

Dang! Sorry the images are so huge. I did resize them before posting. Obviously not enough....