NOW WITH A GOOD START on the French Polish I decided to do the fret leveling today. The rather tedious project starts easily by going over all the frets evenly with a diamond whetstone that is perfectly flat and about 6 inches long. The frets are lightly ground until every fret shows the marks of the stone. Now you know they are level. Any frets that were a little high will have a significant flat area ground into their tops. the lowest frets will just barely be touched, but they must now all be re=rounded and polished to be perfectly smooth. Once flattened the work begins as each fret must be masked off with tape and carefully filed with a concave fret file to restore the rounded crown. Then the file marks must be sanded off with a sanding stick and three successive grades of rubber fret "erasers" well they look like erasers but have a slight abrasive in them, each one finer than the previous. I got all three ukes leveled today, whew! glad that tedious job is over. Here you can see the file, the sanding stick and the three "erasers" as well as the ten power loupe used to check on the smoothness of the finished job. The frets to the right are finished. If you look carefully at the three frets farthest to the left you can see how much they are flattened. Those were especially high but were rounded at the level of all the rest by the above process by the time I was done. If this job is not done you are sure to get buzz.
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