Fret Buck

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I recently built a fret buck to enable me to put frets on after neck set.

You can buy these made of cast iron but I didn't want to spend the $170 required so I made my own. It was a fun project which took a little bit of thought to engineer the dimensions correctly so it would fit in the sound hole and apply upward pressure on the traverse brace. I also had to rack my brain to come up with the barrel nut as a solution to allow the threaded rod to pivot a bit as the knob is turned.

I don't have plans for this thing, but if anyone is interested I could probably draw up something usable.

fret buck 1.jpg

[tippie53]

sweet you should have documented your process
we love pictures

[Morecowbell]

Thanks for sharing - I can't enlarge the pic for some reason. But yes, please post more pics and some action shots!

[Rag Thumb]

I am sorry I didn't take pictures as I was building this thing, but honestly it was a very seat-of-the-pants effort which I kept adjusting as I went. I did find a few other homemade fret bucks on the web and used those as inspiration for this build, adjusting for the materials I had on hand and what I thought would be obtainable from a machining standpoint for me.

The concept of this thing is pretty simple: it applies pressure upward under the fretboard extension and firmly transfers the energy from any hits with a fretting hammer to a large surface area on the top. The largest, kinda square, piece of maple is the base through which all of the energy transfers. It is covered with adhesive-backed cork underneath to protect the finish.

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The upward pressure is applied under fretboard extension area on this cork covered pad. I had to be aware of the traverse brace dimension when figuring out how to attach this to the end of curved arm and have it clear the brace to rest under the fretboard extension.

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The curved arm was perhaps the biggest head-scratcher for me. I had to take into account the sizes of any potential sound holes I might encounter to make sure I would be able to snake the business end (pad) into the sound hole and under the traverse brace, and then stay clear of the sound hole when turning the red thumbwheel to bring the pad up into contact with the underside of the extension. You can tell by the picture I had to make several adjustments to the arm. Another problem I had to figure out was how to allow the arm to swivel up into position. The fix I came up with was to put a slotted hole in the top of the arch, through which the long 1/4-20 bolt is attached at one end to the red thrumbscrew, and on the bottom of the curved arm I used a cross dowel through which the 1/4-20 bolt goes.

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Sorry I didn't have any action shots of this thing being built.

The large horseshoe cutout in the white base is there to provide enough room to work on the frets on the extension.

[Rag Thumb]

Here are some pictures of other areas of the fret buck.

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This is the "axle" that the curved arm rides on. It is a 1/4-20 bolt using nylon bushings as a bearing surface and locking nut on one end.

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I used 3/4 furniture plywood at double thickness to form the arch and the arm. That thickness worked well dimensionally and is plenty strong. There is no give in this structure at all.

[ruby@magpage.com]

Isn't the mass of the weight important for dampening the blows?

[Rag Thumb]

I'm sorry but I don't know the technical answer to your question about mass. However, the base of my fret buck is 1-1/4" thick maple which is quite dense and heavy, so I think it probably has a similar mass to that of the cast iron one you can buy for $170. Lucky for me the maple was a table top that a neighbor was throwing away.

I would also think that the large surface area under my buck goes a long way to dispersing the force of the blows (which shouldn't be that forceful anyway unless I get carried away with myself ;) ). It covers almost half of the guitar top if not more. Last but not least the cork afixed to the bottom of the back should also absorb some of the blow while also protecting the top.

I'll be using it for the first time soon so I'll let you know if my build explodes when I use it.