Can it be done without diamond files? Small repairs yes, but not a 37 year old guitar that’s on it’s 3rd and final fret resurfacing. It takes 16 hours with the right tools.
Try to remove grooves, and reprofile frets that have large flat areas with sandpaper?
even if you can the accuracy will be way off.
Cant imagine going from 320 right to steel wool either.
The goal to me, is to make the guitar as good as new, and set it up as well as any custom shop.
I check the whole neck w a fret rocker, and digital depth caliper first.
I use a diamond Stew Mac Zfile and or center file to re-crown the frets first, otherwise the intonation will be horrible. Ever play a guitar that’s in tune with an open G, but a s soon as you play open D it’s not? That’s what RE-crowning fixes. It’s from all those 2nd fret bends and squeals, but it also happens all over the neck.
After that I calculate how many hundredths, I can remove from all 24 frets to have one even plane, without removing too much fret wire.
Thats when a sharpie and a radius profile block come in. Different radius block for every guitar. I start with self adhesive 220 grit, then 320, then 400, until the frets are one continuous plane.
I reprofile the frets again, lightly, then switch to a special fret end file.
Back to the sharpie, but this time 320, to 400, to 600, to 800, to 1000 grit self adhesive sandpaper.
After that, fret erasers starting with 400 grit, 600, 800, 1200, 2000, 4000, finally 8000 !
One last pass with special fret polish, and the frets look like glass.
I just restored a 37 year old Carvin DC200, and it plays like new. The action is very low without a single buzz anywhere.
minimum of $800 in tools to do it right, lots of time, a massive mess of filings to clean up at every step, all while protecting the guitar. Re-fretting is A lot more expensive tool wise. A good press, with profiled jigs Just for starters. it’s not fun, and it’s very easy to make critical mistakes. I’ve got plenty of practice, and made all my mistakes 25 years ago on cheap guitars.
A couple of things I learned.. First. Don’t choose stainless steel fretwire for your first full re-fret job ever. :0) LOL! .. Ooooh, Man! ... I’m glad that was a mistake I only had to make once! :0) ...Nickel wire, Evo, SO much easier to work with! ..For a first time, using stainless fretwire adds about a hundred degrees to your learning curve and about thirty new cuss-words to your vocabulary :0)
So there’s that.
... also..I found that re-surfacing the fretboard after pulling all the frets on a full re-fret job saves a ton of work on leveling and crowning.
Hundred-percent agree with you on the radiused sanding blocks, ..actually bought another-one yesterday for a neck I will be working on next, cant really do good work without them (not too easily anyway).
Like you say self-adhesive sandpaper.. yes. Folding sandpaper over a block? No.
..Something else too, The Chemical Guys Optical Polish. Unless they reformulated, it doesn’t leave any discoloring residue on dark wood! So you can carefully use small amounts of that with those small sharpie-like felt rotary pads you use on a dremmel (at low rpms) to bring inlay very-quickly to a mirror-like shine. Because that’s stuff uses ceramic cutting particles, it polishes mother of pearl as well as anything else. Found that to be the fastest, most effective and cleanest way to polish inlay on rosewood/ebony necks.
But resurfacing the fretboard not-only brings that board to better-than-factory new, but it really makes the whole re-fretting process so much easier. I can usually ref-fret in about four-and-a-half - five hours if the old frets aren’t glued in and there isn’t much in the way of chip repair. Used to take substantially longer than that without re-surfacing the fretboard.
If anybody is interested in learning how, pick-up the cheapest guitar-kit you can find, and go to town. You can practice fixing everything on that guitar because those kits need boatloads of work to be in any-way really playable. Imagine the best guitar in the world, and take your time turning that POS kit, into what you can imagine. You don’t have to get it done in a week, or a month; take your time, and do it right.
Need a tool? ...purchase that tool when spare cash affords it. I have spent over a year on some of my restorations. No rush. You accumulate your tools over time, so no massive initial outlay, and those bucks you spend will eventually more than pay for themselves when it comes to working on your own stable of real guitars. :0)
Basic setups? Truss-rod adjustments, saddle and bridge adjustments? ...it doesn’t cost much for those tools, and it’s very easy to learn how to do those jobs yourself, very hard to mess those jobs up, and it saves so much money and inconvenience when you know how.. I’m always adjusting truss-rods on my guitars (for example).
The advanced stuff.. unless you are into restoring old guitars or buying cheaper guitars to fix-up, most people won’t need to learn how to re-fret a neck. But learning how to level and crown your own frets, does wonders for a guitar’s playability. But I would suggest learning that kinda thing on a disposable neck, which you can buy off eBay for not a lot of cash.
Learning how to wire your guitar’s electronics makes it very easy to get the sounds you want out of a guitar you wish sounded different. ... If you are going to get into that, Don’t scrimp on your solder, or iron. Get a good soldering iron. They last your entire life and they do a much better job, much easier, with far less mess, than that six buck chisel-tip wal-mart special.