Low-tech solution: Candle and dedicated butter knife (I say 'dedicated' because the blade will discolor and 'butter' because you want the heat to cut, not the sharpness). Put the handle on a stack of CDs and the blade over the candle. As the candle burns down remove a CD or two. Be sure to use a low soot candle --that stuff is pernicious.
Higher tech: Do it in the kitchen w/ the blade over a stove burner and the burner on the lowest setting.
"Lute@cs.Dartmouth.edu"grade Hi-tech: Soldering iron. Sean On Mar 21, 2009, at 9:21 AM, chriswi...@yahoo.com wrote:
Manolo,I'm bad. Very bad. I _hate_ changing frets! Makes me break out in a cold sweat, hives and diarrhea every time, it makes me so nervous. I'd rather clean out a backed-up sewage pipe in a tuxedo than put new frets on even though it definitely sounds and feels better when I do.This might have something to do with the fact that I once had a couple of otherwise fine bass strings unexpectedly snap on my theorbo as I was using a lighter to finish the fret knot. Of course, it happened right before a recording session. This, despite the fact that I was bending back the strings quite far away from the small flame. There's a nice extra bill for you! ..and a theorbo that was useless until I could get new strings since I don't keep a stash of low diapasons on hand. (Any of those guys we order strings from are always sooo agonizingly slow getting strings out to us.)Then there was the time I recently had to put new frets on a student's lute. In a tiny college practice room. With a smoke detector. Using someone's borrowed matches. I was sure I was going to set the fire alarm and sprinklers off and ruin everybody's $400,000 violins and cellos.Chris --- On Sat, 3/21/09, ml <man...@manololaguillo.com> wrote:From: ml <man...@manololaguillo.com> Subject: [LUTE] Re: frequent re-fretting, a must... was nylon frets To: "List LUTELIST" <lute@cs.dartmouth.edu> Date: Saturday, March 21, 2009, 7:44 AM I would avoid using nylon for fretting. A 6 c. lute I used to have had them, the builder himself did it. When I changed to gut the sound changed for good. Let's say that it sounded less bad with gut then with nylon, all other things being the same. OK, nylon frets last forever, but this is a minor benefit, because changing gut frets is not difficult at all, perhaps only the 1st. I've seen it so often: a lute with new frets has a much better sound! Strange, how we can be so lousy, and not change frets more frequently... But perhaps this was said to you already by others in this list. Manolo El 21/03/2009, a las 12:13, Omer Katzir escribió:For the past two hours I've replaced the frets inmy lute for a nylon frets, old b string for guitar.It took some time, and I replaced only four for now(my hands hurts) but at least in know how to handle that.Now, from the front It doesn't looks very weird,just a neck with frets. in the back, it doesn't look really good. I have to use pieces of tape to stretch the fret. But its not soooo bad...I think I can handle that...at least until May.Thank you everybody! I will supply pictures if you want :-) To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
