Ibanez RS1400 refret and set up
2,739 views · Published 14 October 2016 · 3:44:21 · Indexed 20 September 2026
Channel: Sam Deeks · 2016 · Howto & Style
This is typical of a Reloved Guitars project: Teemu contacted me from Finland to ask if I would re-fret his vintage Ibanez RS1400. This is a guitar that he had rescued from storage and decided to put back into playing order. He was stripping and oiling the body and neck as well as fitting new pickups & electrics; he wanted me to re-fret it and set it up. This lovely guitar has a thru-neck, the first I’ve had in the workshop. As you’ll see from the video, the re-fret took like a dream and ended up setting up perfectly without even needing the customary fret leveling. Of course, the precision of this re-fret made me look closely at what I did on this re-fret and what made it work so well. I treated this neck as if it were a bound neck – that is, I undercut the tang so that it didn’t disturb the slot fills the guitar already had (I find them quite hard to achieve after the fact with glue and rosewood dust etc). Doing that, however, makes it harder to clean out the slots as you can only use scraping tools like blades in the space between the end fills – difficult to do. Despite that (maybe pure luck) the slots must have been just right because the new frets went in and seated perfectly. One big difference on this guitar was that I chose to use superglue rather than wood glue. The change of glue creates a big difference in process; wood glue takes hours to set meaning that you have to fret and clamp in clusters. If a fret is seated wrong you tend to only really see it hours later. Then you have to pull it, cut a new fret, install it, glue it and….wait again. With superglue, you’re working on each fret in turn. You know right there and then within 60 seconds if that fret is or isn’t in right before moving on. The downside that I’ve found with superglue is that getting the frets out again can do a lot more damage to the fingerboard than with wood glue (which softens and releases the frets more readily). The end result is a beautiful old guitar with a fresh lease of playing life in this re-fret. More pictures here: https://www.facebook.com/relovedguitars/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1779241565666289
