Sterling JP60 frets

[JamieCrain]

Hi all
I just took delivery of a new JP60 MDR-2 to compliment my 2015 AD Majesty.

First impressions are that this is an excellent guitar for the money. Aside from the Mystic Dream finish which everyone loves, the guitar feels well-built, the trem works smoothly, the neck is smooth, and the pups sound great through my Helix.

One issue though, is that the frets are 'rough' on the strings. It's weird - if I slide my finger along a fret it feels perfectly smooth, but if I bend a string at the same fret, it feels like its crossing sandpaper. Visually, when i look at some of the frets in the sun, I can see that they are not as well polished as my other guitars. Very small grooves etc. like it missed the final polish phase in manufacturing.

Anyone else experienced this? Any ideas how to resolve it? I feel like it should be a simple fix but would love to hear others' thoughts before I jump in.

Thanks

 

[PeteDuBaldo]

One thing that bugs me on new guitars is rough frets like you are describing.

When I get guitars at the shop like that I take the strings off, wrap some 1200 grit sandpaper around a pencil eraser (the block kind), and run it over the frets a few times until they look smooth. After they have smoothed out to my liking I polish them up with a buffing wheel and compound on a Dremel. Once in a while the frets don't clean up with 1200 grit and I will need to use 1000 or even 800 grit to get out the tool marks in the frets, then go back over them with 1200, then buff to a shine with the Dreme and felt buffing wheel.

We offered this service as a "no-charge" upgrade on the Sterling instruments, and it made for lots of happy customers.

 

[JamieCrain]

Thanks for the reply. Looks like a busy weekend ahead.

I feel like this is pretty big shortfall in QA to be honest. Given that the frets are what you touch/feel, these should be a priority when finishing the instrument. I bought this online, so I didn't know about it until it arrived. Had I tried it in-store, it would have been fairly obvious, the scraping feeling is very evident.

One unintended consequence i suppose is that it now makes the Majesty feel even more superior than before!