Fret Slot Cleaning Tools

Cleaning your fret slots is an important step of refretting any guitar. The fret slots must be clean in order to accept the new frets. Before you use your fret slot cleaning tool, you will need to take out your fret slot saw and saw or scrape away the hardened glue that is left over inside the fret slot. For more information about fret slot saws, please see my fret slot saw article. The fret slot saw will leave sawdust and debris inside the fret slot. This is where the fret slot-cleaning tool works well.

How it works

The fret slot cleaning tools is basically a curved x-acto knife. You can use it to scrape out all of the remaining glue bit and sawdust left over from the fret slot saw. You may not think that this is really that useful of a tool. I mean why can you just blow the dust out of the slot? Well, you never want to blow any dust off your fretboard when you are working on the frets or fret slots. The reason for this is because you may have chipped the fretboard while you were pulling the frets out of it. The small chips may still be lying on the fretboard. You don't want to blow those away. Instead, you want to keep them and glue them back into place when you are ready to glue your fret back on. The fret slot-cleaning tool allows you to clean out the fret slot with out potentially losing small pieces of the fretboard. Here are some inexpensive fret slot cleaning tools that luthiers use.

X-acto Set

Single knife

Replacement blades

The fret slot-cleaning tool is a useful tool to keep especially when dealing with fretboards with binding. The curved blade allows you to bring the dust and debris to the edges of the binding and scoop them out. Trust me; you will want this tool. If you would like more information about how to use a how to refret your guitar, please see my guitar fretting articles.