The maple necks on American Fenders are sprayed with poly after the fretting.  This puts a coating on the frets that helps suck tone and create string drag.  Polishing the frets without hitting the maple board takes extra care and requires about an extra 1.5 hours of work, depending on the amount of over spray.  Although polishing frets are part of my set-up fee, this extra time eater requires an extra $40.  Can you feel a difference under your fingertips?  You bet.  Can you hear a better tone?  Absolutely.

Here’s a Les Paul Custom Shop in garnet and gold getting some buffing, cleaning, fret polishing, and setup.

After carefully sanding the back down to 2000 grit, it’s ready for 3M buffing compounds.

The final finish looked better than the front. 

The quality of a glossy surface can always be judged by the ease of which you can read fine print in the reflection.

The owner authorized me to remove the factory buffing marks on the front to give it an extra fine gloss.

Here’s a nice shorter scale 1990 Millennium model classical guitar from the late great Thomas Humphrey undergoing a fret polishing and fingerboard cleaning/conditioning. 

True to Tom’s fashion, details weren’t always his main concern.  This instrument had a 6th string that was simply lower than the rest and would buzz quite easily.  This is a vintage colored nut blank from Stewart MacDonald about to be installed.

This is the same Millennium after the French polished body has been buffed out.  Notice the intricate rosette that Tom used on his guitars.  Beautiful.

In the late 90’s the C.F. Martin Company approached Tom and asked to build his guitars with their name on it also.  Although he agreed, they were only made for a few years. They had radiused fingerboards, steel string frets and soundboard bracing, which probably lead to their demise, although some sound quite nice.  This guitar is one of those.  This guitar was in need of some serious love, in addition to having a Fishman Ellipse pickup system installed. 

Before

After

Before

After