These two new tools are indispensable for anyone that does very much fretting work—especially repairmen that face a broad variety of slot sizes and fret sizes in re-frets. Both tools are designed and manufactured by Frank Ford of Gryphon Instruments in Palo Alto, CA. Frank is nationally known and respected for his repair work on vintage fretted instruments. Please check out his great CD-ROM, Frets.com (BM45), for pictures and descriptions of many of these repairs. He considers these tools essential for his efficiency on re-frets. They are used to size a given fretwire so it can be secured properly into the slots of any fingerboard. The FFT-1 Fret Expander is used to make a fret tang thicker to fit correctly into a wider slot. The FFT-2 Fret Compressor is used to compress the knobs on the fret tang so that the fret will fit well into a narrower slot. By using either of these tools you can make just about any fretwire fit any slot. To achieve this end without these tools repairmen have had to stock a wide variety of fretwires and have fret slot saws in many sizes. Thanks, Frank!
