For the seasoned veteran builders I beg your wisdom:
I have recently refretted an older Rigel mandolin that had already been refretted a few times, so the slots were a little ragged. This instrument has carbon reinforcement instead of a truss rod and the fingerboard had some serious upcurve going at both ends so I had to level it first. The owner hits hard and played regularly enough in the past that he was going through a set of frets every 5 years. His research lead him to EVO gold and I put in the 0.080" bead EVO to match the nickel/silver that was in it. I've used this same wire on 4 other mandolins which all came out fine. The Rigel is a compound radius so I pretty much had custom bend each fret before setting them. Even with the worn slots, the new frets had enough grab that they took the usual amount of hammering to set. While dressing the ends I discovered that a couple of them needed a touch of CA at the ends.
To make a long story short, the owner has jacked up the action on the treble side considerably and still is not happy with the tone. While not out-and-out buzzing, many notes are not ringing clearly. This is with the action on the E string at almost 0.080"! Two factors are at play. The owner plays with a very strong attack. The other is that there is only 0.002" of relief in the neck. He had a lengthy conversion with Pete Langdell who tells him that the relief needs to be in the range of 0.007 to 0.009" of an inch, which seems like a lot for a mandolin to me. With no truss rod, I'm now in the position of sanding relief into the frets with a short block, which gives me the hebee gebees. In working on this instrument this morning, I discovered a 3rd fret that is loose, so loose I was able to lift it out of the slot with my fingers. Yikes, it is glued in now.
So my big question in all of this is: should I have glued all the frets in? Would the glue improve the tone? I've not been in the habit of gluing all frets in, but I haven't encountered fret slots this worn before. I recently also refretted an old Stelling for the same customer, and the slots had some type of white glue in the bottom, perhaps fish glue. The bridge on the Rigel was also overextended for a long time and the top saddle portion leans over a good deal. I lobbied for a Cumberland replacement but the customer was happy with the tone he was getting with the original bridge.
I know some builders always glue in frets. I've avoided it because I know the next guy is going to have to heat the frets to get them out and and then deal with cleaning out the slots before refretting. What say you veterans who've been doing this a long time? To glue or not to glue?
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