This a rather unusual one, Ibanez guitars are normally a lot better than this…

Having set it up to a normal standard it was choking out badly at the first fret.  Turns out the first fret is really low.  The only way to dial that problem out would be to put in a rather excessive neck relief, but that would make the action very high further up the neck.

The only real solution is to dress all the frets and lower them to the level of the first one.

Off with the neck then, tape the fretboard to protect it while I work and mark the fret tops so I can see where the levelling beam is cutting into the frets.

It’s very important that the fretboard is absolutely flat and it was at this point I realised where the true problem was.  The neck just isn’t even, it falls away around the 2nd and 3rd frets which is why the first is so low.  I was able to get the fret tops level, it was just a much bigger job than I at first thought.

I use a calibrated level beam with sticky-backed sandpaper.  You can instantly see the high and low points.

As I start to work the first two frets weren’t being touched at all.

Eventually I got the level down to the second and then first frets.

 

Once the beam is cutting into all the frets it’s time to stop.  The problem now is that most of the frets now have flat tops, like this….

So I need to re-crown each fret to round off the tops, to the red line…

Using a concave diamond grit file…

Round off the shoulders of each fret slowly until the 2 sides meet in the middle.

Having filed down the frets I now need to re-polish them to give them a nice clean shine.

With all than done all I had to do is bolt it back together, revisit the setup (since all I’ve done is take the neck off all I need to do is reset the neck relief and it should fall into place, and it did).

If you have any similar problems, or any other problems for that matter, just give me a call or send me an email and we’ll have a chat about it.