I reinstalled the neck at this stage (hopefully for the last time), which is a very easy task with this bolt on neck - 2 bolts accessed through the soundhole.
The frets need to lie in a level plane, so that the "action" can be set nice and low (making it easier to push strings against frets) but without allowing the strings to "buzz" against any high points further up the neck.
Firstly, the fretboard needs to be as straight as possible by tweaking the truss rod, then I ran a sharpie over the top of each fret to track what material is taken off each one.
I had a very lightly used sharpening stone that is nice and flat and used that to run backwards and forwards along the frets until they were all showing material removed (i.e. no sharpie left). At that stage they should all be level. Some people use a file for this but the stone worked really well for me.
Then I reprofiling the frets to put a curved shape back on them, using a special fret file that is set to a 2mm radius.
That’s the basics done really - after that, it’s a case of working through finer grades of emery paper to progressively smooth off and polish the frets and fretboard. At the same time I made sure the fret edges were nicely rounded and smoothed off to be level with the edge of the fretboard.
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