Levelling a levelled fretboard

[Frans]

Hi everyone, while working on 3 or 4 frets of my Ibanez bass (fretrocker) that were too high on places, I noticed that most frets have dents were strings hit them.

My question is: knowing none of my frets are too high now, to get rid of those dents, can I sand the whole fretboard equally with my beam and will it still be level ?

 

Thanx in advance

[Bizman62]

Dents are a common cause for fret leveling. So are tall frets. Basically you could have addressed both issues on one go but there's nothing wrong with first spot leveling the tall ones.

So the next step would be to lower all frets to the bottom of the dents. And a beam is a commonly used tool for that.

You can use a marker on the frets so you'll know that you've sanded all frets and depending on the depth of the dents you may need to reapply the markings. And of course you'll have to recrown the frets after leveling.

[Frans]

I suppose (I'm dutch) by 'tall frets' you mean the 'high ones'?

Oh, would it be wise to first google for the minimal fretheight?

[Bizman62]

Yes, by tall I mean high. Tall seems to be commonly used when talking about fret height. I'm a Finn...

There's no such thing as 'minimal fretheight'. There's lower and taller frets by design, the lowest maybe the 'fretless wonder' by Gibson back in the late 1950's to early 70's. They were about half a millimetre tall or even less. The tallest frets are about 1.5 mm. The minimum is highly subjective, it's the height you still like to play on.

[Frans]

I read somewhere that you don't sand (level) under 0,65 mm fretheight, for reason that playing gets undoable then.

[Bizman62]

Tell that to the Fretless Wonder players. Crown height .015 to .020 according to https://www.mylespaul.com/threads/fret-wire-for-freless-wonders.78997/post-3165557

That's 0,38 to 0,5 millimetres.

That's an obscurity, though. For someone who has played on 'normal' height frets under 0,65 mm may well be unplayable. So if you're re-leveling the n'th time you may consider refretting instead if you're going that low.

Oh, and I noticed an error in my previous post: 'Tall' means the height of any fret. 'High* usually means a fret that sits higher than the other ones.

Back to your original question, dents on the frets usually look much deeper than what they really are. Same goes for frets sitting too high. I did a fret job for a friend who strongly believed that he'd need a total refretting done, the pictures tell the story:

 So if you start at some 1,2 mm, then level the high ones and finally level all frets down to the bottom of the scratches you may actually take only some 0,1mm away.