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This was brought to my attention today - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgzeeXnBlL4
He says he uses it to fill any voids under the frets. and it releases with a soldering iron or heat rather.
"No More Nails is a nail-free general purpose construction adhesive with high initial grab and high bond strength"
I've used it for DIY, but never for frets. Doesn't seem to shrink.

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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.

Wonder how hard it is when dry? Think I will stick with hide.

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

In the 80's, I used epoxy per the Don Teeter method. However, I switched to Titebond in the late 90's and haven't looked back. I do use CA glue now and then for special cases or just to glue down fret ends that lifted.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I use fish glue. With a needle I can inject it right into the slot. I use glue to help hold in the fret. I have heard others make the claim that slots need to be filled but I take it with a grain of salt. If the fret is loose then of course you will have issues even with tone. But it seems to me that a well fit fret under string tension where the tension tries to 'close' the slot even, that it would not be an issue. We all have our ways and reasons though.

I stopped filling slots with glue years ago. A student had some issues with loss of tone on the guitar he'd made; not fret buzz, but just a loss of clarity. Even though the fret rocker showed no issues we tried blacking the fret tops and hitting them with a long flat file; sure enough, some of them were just a little high. When everything had been leveled and re-rounded the tone was back. The strings were not making enough contact to buzz, but were choking out a bit.

It seemed to me that the pressure of the strings trying to close the fret slots could compress the Titebond glue and push the frets up, so I stopped doing that. I have not had that problem since.

I believe I read an article in GAL years ago in which Richard Brune said that he wicks CA from the edge, after the frets are set. In fact, I think that he then smeared CA over the entire fingerboard and buffed it back.

I’m more concerned about frets not being fully seated (ie the crown in contact with the fingerboard along its length) than I am with whether a tiny void exists under the tang. If I can slide a 0.001” gauge under the crown anywhere I consider the fret not seated. Once it’s fully seated I wick in a small amount of thin CA to ensure it stays where I’ve put it.

My primary reason for doing this is not to help “tone”, I do it because I’ve prepped the fingerboard to a certain profile, and by seating the frets perfectly to that profile I barely need to level them to get a great fret plane. This is value for the customer, who gets maximum life out of the new frets they’ve just paid for.

I honestly doubt that anyone could genuinely pick the difference, in a blind listening test, between two properly seated frets where one has a minute air gap under the tang and the other has a couple thousandths of dried construction adhesive.

Anyone who thinks they can would achieve more tonal improvement by taking every moment they ever spent worrying about the topic, and using it to actually practice playing their guitar

If you prepare your fret slots to properly fit the fret wire that you use glue is insurance and not supposed to be what is holding the fret to the board. Additionally we do want the fret work to be serviceable because frets do wear out, even stainless frets wear out at times and need to be replaced.

Some folks like to pot frets in glue filling the entire slot and that's cool.

We don't do that and use thin CA wicked in along a bead on one side of the fret and we no longer clamp when gluing again favoring a great fit of fret to board AND fret ends nicely down with the removed tang, if a bound board filed flat. We slightly over radius our fret wire which helps keep the ends down too. We also wax the board making CA clean up a breeze.

So glue to us has a more minor expectation which is added insurance but we rely on matching fret tangs to slots to keep the frets home for the most part. We also do a lot of fret work, a lot...

With this said our frets are friction fit to the slots which is the coupling that we rely on for sonic success with fret work, glue is for the rainy days but part of our mix too.

I been using tite bond for years learned that trick at Martin but it isn't really gluing it in as much as you think. I like it as it fills the gap at the
fret ends and now with pocket frets you don't need to fill.
It will act as a lubricant for the fret bars to slip . Its one of those things that I don't think matters. I agree with Hesh in that you can never take to much care in prepping the fret board

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John Hall
blues creek guitars
Authorized CF Martin Repair
Co President of ASIA
You Don't know what you don't know until you know it

I like that it fills the fret ends. Very cool John.

Quick question, Hesh:

I too wick CA along one edge, but I’ve yet to find a really good cleanup technique. I try to wipe down immediately, but it often smears a thin film I only see after it dries. How do you deal with it?


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The prevailing wisdom at Greenridge was either fully fill the slot or go dry. The few call-backs I saw on refrets were dead notes on one or more frets, and those were universally an air bubble in an otherwise filled slot. We used hot hide for any wire we thought would require replacement at some point, and medium CA with stainless.

We never saw glue as a fix for bad fret fit, but instead a way to get consistent fret bedding and a good seal of the slot surfaces against moisture penetration (sweat does a nice job of corroding and eventually loosening nickel silver frets...the best reason for using Howard's at string change intervals).

In terms of CA technique, we used the aforementioned medium CA (BSI is excellent for the job) with a slightly flattened whip tip to start filling the slot about 1/8" from the treble side to just below the fretboard surface, and ended the fill 1/8" from the bass edge...and by 'just below the surface' I mean the surface of the glue was visible as a 'U' shaped surface below that of the fretboard. Any glue that did make it out on early frets got wiped off well before it set, with a razor blade scrape to clean up the thin film left if I got sloppy. Calibrate the glue application to the remaining slots based on what is seen on the first few...a slight overfill is preferable to an under-filled slot. We spritzed the fretboard with GluBoost, but just waiting an hour will see everything fully cured.

We reserved thin CA or super thin for stubborn fret ends that were usually compromised in holding power due to years of sweat and corrosion or damage to the slots during prior refrets. Vinyl tape or wax crayon can minimize CA transfer to adjacent surfaces, but a slightly flatten micro-pipette tip carefully applied is much faster and just as clean when time is money.

Worth noting that slots need to be over-filled with HHG just as joints are routinely made to generate lots of squeeze-out, as cleanup with HHG is trivial versus other adhesives.

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A constellation only takes shape when one maps the whole.
- Beth Brower

Randy we apply a light coat, light coat of Howard Feed-n-wax to the entire board and we keep it light so no wax migrates under the frets. Thin CA is then used with a bead up against the fret on one side and you can see it disappear and then reappear wetting near the fret on the other side. We don't always see it on the other side but we don't get any loose frets either.

The wax makes clean up a breeze and if it doesn't stop all of the CA from staining the board a single edge razor blade makes a great scraper and makes fast work of cleaning up every fret.

Some more general comments. Over time people here sometimes use this from that person and that from another person and that becomes their method of doing this or that. Mario was keen to say that glue is also a lubricant for fret slots. It most definitely is but we spend our time prepping the slots for a good friction fit but never tight so for us the CA is insurance and not doing the heavy lifting.

It also released well for refrets and cleans out of slots better than any other glue we have encountered. Serviceability is important to us.

Hope this helps.

PS: Try the singe edge scraper blade it's great for grungy fret board so long as they are not maple. Chatter is possible but with a little practice, just a few minutes getting chatter less results becomes easy.

Brilliant!

I use wax n feed on my fretboards, but hadn’t thought of applying BEFORE fretting.

Yes, like Alan I mostly rely on a good fit and forgo glue. But recently I did a build that I KNOW was level… and it started buzzing. I realized a fret had lifted ever so slightly. Probably too much over bend. In any case I opted for some CA insurance. But then I found I had a thin smear of CA in a few spots I’d applied too much glue. Aaaargh! A few fretboards later and I still wasn’t getting good cleanup (pretty sure only my eyes would notice, but, you know how that goes.)

Thanks!


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Yep that happens and try a single edge razor blade as a scraper they work great and freshen up board very nicely too. I do a lot of set-ups, around 25 a week with my other jobs and some people really gunk up the fret board. Typically I mask off any electronics such as pick-ups with 2" wide 3M masking tape and use OOOO steel wool which will clean up a board very nicely too but the scraper actually removes the wood that is stained and is more aggressive.

Another useful thing we do that might help you Randy is if you have the Jaws II tool and some cauls from Stew Mac a loose fret can be clamped back down with the Jaws II and then run the bead of thin CA even on both sides of the fret and let it dry for 5 minutes or so and then clean up. Nails them down nicely and lets me move on to the rest of the job.

Do be cautious with pearl inlay on a board and the single edge razor blade. The pearl being very hard can dent or chip the razor's edge and then you might get a visible line when scraping. I pitch the blade and get a new one. In a worse case situation 2 - 3 blades will do a pearl inlaid board and only one blade does mother of toilet seat inlays great.

For those of you who wax the board prior to finishing do you try and keep the wax out of the slots? I have always been doing it after fretting for that reason. Maybe it simply doesn't matter?

Yes, I keep my paste wax out of the slots. I do that by applying it parallel to the fret slots and not overdoing the wax.

Wax in the fret slots could make the glued in fret less secure.

Many of my fretboards are bound. I like to use 'alternative' woods, such as American hornbeam and Persimmon, which need to be stained so as not to show dirt too much. For this I use a walnut hull 'tea. Binding the fingerboards with walnut allows me to only stain the surface, avoiding slopping stain over on other part of the guitar.

I like to glue the binding on with Titebond, but cleaning the glue out of the ends of the slots is a pain. Some years ago it occurred to me to use something similar to 'no-stick-strips' to ease that. I found that many plastic can tops, such as from peanut cans, are polyethylene, and about .020" thick, so you can often find one that will just fit into the fret slot. This works particularly well if you cut strips and stretch then when you put them in. I put plastic strips in all the fret slots before I cut the board to width and glue on the bindings. The strips are left in place until I'm ready to fret. The soft plastic is easy to remove; you can catch the end with a knife point and pull them out. The fret slots are perfectly clean all the way to the end. These should keep wax out if you want to use that, too.

With bound fretboards I cut the slots extra deep, to avoid any chance of them ending up too shallow as the board is dressed. Usually there is air space under the frets. So long as the crown of the fret is in good contact al the way along this seems to make no difference. I do file a slight chamfer in the slot edges before I put in the frets, in case there's a radius along the under side of the crown.