Touching up the finish around the fret ends

[DarkPenguin]

De-sprouting seems to have been bad for the finish around the fret ends.  I was planing on sanding through the finish just on the edge of the fret board and hitting it with satin wipe on poly.  This is a fender strat made in mexico neck.  This reasonable or do I need to completely sand the back of the neck and redo all the finish?

 

[Cagey]

You said "planning". Does that mean you haven't filed/sanded through the finish yet? Because if you didn't, you can get back to where you were with polishing papers. They're similar to wet-r-dry papers, but they're more like a cloth and go to much higher grits. The micron sizes they refer to correlate to the rough equivalent of 400, 600, 1200, 4000, 6000 and 8000 grit papers. Starting with the coarsest, you smooth things out, then gradually go through the various grits until everything is nice and shiny again. And as long as the strings are off thing, they also work miracles on frets. Beats the snot out of 0000 steel wool.

 

[DarkPenguin]

I did file through the finish.  I haven't sanded it, tho.  But it still needs some additional finish.

I could not believe how badly the frets sprouted last winter.  I bought a fender USA replacement neck and it hasn't needed any work at all.  Same with my Warmoth neck.  The fender MIM neck?  Sprouted worse than 2 month old potatoes in a damp basement.

 

[Cagey]

This would be a good place to extol the virtues of buying American-made products, but I doubt that had anything to do with it. The particular piece of wood that neck was made of just wasn't dry enough to be made into a neck, so it shrunk a lot. You're probably lucky it didn't go all pretzel on you.

 

[bagman67]

This would of course be the main reason companies like Warmoth came into existence:  Factory goods ain't what they oughta be, so someone decided they could do a better job.


That said, even Warmoth acknowledges you can't prevent everything, even with scientifically teted kiln-drying and seasoning techniques.  Some wood just does what the hell it wants, even in the hands of master builders, no matter what your own plans might be.  As an example, the Carvin neck i have installed on my Strat went all sprouty when I moved to Las Vegas last year, too, and Carvin make top-shelf stuff.  Fortunately I hadn't finished the neck nor otherwise put it into service yet, so filing the sprouted ends didn't screw up a finish.  Even so, I was a little put out.

 

[DarkPenguin]

So far so poorly.  I'm leaning towards completely sanding the back down and hitting it with one or two coats of wipe on poly.