alternative fretting material

[Jason Brown]

Are there any alternative fretting materials that can be used for frets? Has anyone used anything other than fretwire? How were your results?

[Hans Bezemer]

There are some alternatives:
The first guitars had bars as frets, which are still sold
Steelwire and fishingline are used.
There's a thread about alternatives to fretwire on the forum of cigarboxnation

Guitarbuilder Todd Keehn uses stainless steel rods.

Some options I thought of are:
Using small bars of stainless steel with a width of 2 mm. They still need to be rounded and the slots have to have the same depth. (Which is one of the big advantages of regular fretwire).
When cutting your fretboard with a cnc of waterjetcutter you can make insert holes at the sides of the fretboard and make custum made / cut n-shaped frets (like oversized staples) which will fit in the holes.

For now I'm still getting back to regular fretwire as the best and easiest option.

Edit: instead of regular steelwire piano wire can be used

[Alan Carruth]

On my first dulcimer, made while I was on board an aircraft carrier, I had a guy in the metal shop cut a narrow strip of stainless steel sheet, and used that. The rest of the thing fell apart, but the frets were indestructible. I'll never use urea-formaldehyde glue on another instrument.

[Dan Pennington]

There's a guy on the Banjo Hangout that has used hunks of stainless steel windshield wiper stiffeners for bar frets.

[Jim McConkey]

Violas da gamba traditionally had gut frets tied wet around the fingerboard and allowed to tighten as they dried. The one big advantage is these frets could be "tuned." In a Uke discussion somewhere on this board someone recently mentioned using toothpicks as frets. Many early mountain dulcimers and its European predecessors used harmmered-in staples. Not the most aesthetically pleasing, but they worked and were easily available. In our Recycled Materials challenge a couple years back (on the old Forum), someone used parts from an old photocopier. You can use pretty much anything hard enough to withstand the wear.

But I'm with Hans, modern fret wire was designed to have all the necessary attributes and fewer problems than the alternatives, and is generally the best all-round choice these days, unless you are going for historical accuracy.

[Peter Wilcox]

someone used parts from an old photocopier.

Actually, the frets were one of the few parts NOT from the copy machine - they were hammered out of fence wire.

[Clay Schaeffer]

"There's a guy on the Banjo Hangout that has used hunks of stainless steel windshield wiper stiffeners for bar frets."

I also have thought about doing that and have saved some stiffeners from worn out blades. Did he say how he attached them and how well he liked the end result?

[Dan Pennington]

Clay
His name is Mike Gregory from Wisconsin. Here's his Banjo HangOut homepage:
http://www.banjohangout.org/myhangout/home.asp?id=8805
He either routed or sawed channels across the neck for the bars to fit into and glued them in. But my memory is weak on this part.
The BHO posting where he talked about using the wiper parts as bar frets is not active now, so I can't send you there, but you could contact him yourself for more info.

[Alan Carruth]

There used to be a fellow who put out cardboard dulcimers that were pretty clever. The guts of the thing were all on the fretboard; tuners, frets, and so on. He had corrugated cardboard top and back shapes stamped out, and cross grain strips of same for the sides. The fretboard glued on the top. He'd sign up a whole third grade class to make them, and they'd spend a day gluing them up, painting them, and talking about everything from the musical aspects to the history, and maybe even physics. At the end of the day the kids went home with a playable instrument, some education, and had an enjoyable time, all for $15.

Anyway, on topic: he used to saw grooves in the fretboard surface where the frets went, and drill a little hole in each one. The frets themselves were, iirc, 4d finish nails that he bent over at the point to go into the holes, and they'd sit in the groove, probably with a little encouragement from some white glue.

[Clay Schaeffer]

Hi Dan,
Thanks for the information. Mr Gregory has made some interesting instruments from the pictures he has posted.