Leveling the frets of my G&L L-2000

[Jay2U]

After almost seven years of hard fretting with lots of hammer-ons, some frets were severely dented. I decided to go my own way with a modified file…

 

[Bigguy2017]

But you didn't level them...

[nilebodgers]

22 minutes ago, Bigguy2017 said:

But you didn't level them...

The "take each fret individually down to 1mm" approach assumes the fretboard is completely flat end-to-end. I wonder if it was?

I may have missed a post-crowning polish step going up through the abrasive grits?

[Jay2U]

The height of each fret was measured beforehand, to see if significant differences were present. This appeared to be less than 0.05 mm, which, to my opinion, is rather insignificant. The Indonesian factory building the G&L Tribute L-2000 apparently have good quality control.

After setting up, the bass plays even smoother than before. This may be caused by my preference for lower frets.

[mcnach]

19 hours ago, Jay2U said:

The height of each fret was measured beforehand, to see if significant differences were present. This appeared to be less than 0.05 mm, which, to my opinion, is rather insignificant. The Indonesian factory building the G&L Tribute L-2000 apparently have good quality control.

After setting up, the bass plays even smoother than before. This may be caused by my preference for lower frets.

 

But this only ensures frets are of an even height, not that they're level.

You're taking a big risk assuming the fingerboard is even. It looks like in your case it was even enough and your approach worked. Pretty ingenious with the file, I liked that . However, fingerboards are not necessarily even, not to the kind of tolerances we'd like to ensure frets are levelled, as anyone who has ever done a fretless conversion will probably have experienced. So be careful with this approach!