Repairing a Badly Damaged Les Paul Fingerboard

This job was a bit of a strange one. The client was having isssues with the fretting on his Les Paul at the top of the neck and was convinced that filing the frets and the fingerboard between the frets would help fix the problem. You can see in the first couple of pictures here how that looked! We carried out a full refret here. We removed all the frets , then carefully relevelled and profiled the fingerboard, checking the fingerboard radius as we went along. We needed to deepen the fret slots after this to accept the new frets. there was a considerable dip around the 16th and 17th frets which we decided was too deep to correct by planing the fingerboard and removing more ebony, so we opted to fill this with ebony dust and glue. The job worked out great and with the new Jim Dunlop 6150 wire in place, you’d never be able to tell the guitar had been through such a trauma!