Low Cost (Actually No Cost) Fret Bender
Having seen those cool looking “can opener” type fret benders and realizing their usefulness due to the fact that the radius of the frets can be easily changed with a simple hex wrench, I decided some time back to scrounge around my workshop and see if I could knock together a fret bender of my own for little or no cost.
I didn’t want to spend much money on parts and, as it turned out, I didn’t have to actually buy anything for this tool. Everything needed was lying around in piles of broken appliances, car parts, drawers and amongst other junk. I was fortunate enough to find a couple of old greasy bearings which happened to have an oil groove machined on the face of each one. I figured this groove – which was a semi-circular profile rather than a v-groove as it turned out – would be perfect for guiding the fret wire through as I radiused it. Now all I needed was a top wheel, a backing plate to mount them on, a few nuts and bolts and a handle of some sort to use as a crank.
I decided to make my own “center wheel” from a plywood disc cut with a router on a trammel jig – which in my case was basically just a piece of plastic with a thick nail in it and a hole to allow the router bit through. This worked out well and I was able to do the job quickly and easily. Also, because I had a center hole drilled in my disc as my pivot point, I was able to use that for the mounting hole for the bolt. I should add that I had to temporarily mount the disc on the bolt and chuck it in the drill press so that I could – carefully and on a very slow speed – cut a groove for the fret tang so that the tang would not be crushed as you fed the wire through. I used a block of wood set at the right height and a stiff-backed tenon saw resting on it to to this. Be CAREFUL though! Make sure you go slowly, lightly and with the direction of the disc and not against the rotation in case the saw blade “bites’ and the momentum throws the saw back at you.
I could’ve just used another piece or two of plywood for the backing board and stand but I happened to find a half box shaped piece of steel instead. I have no idea what this piece was originally supposed to be for but I decided to use it anyway and it worked excellently for my purposes. As it turned out it also already had a few holes drilled in it that I thought would be fairly convenient and might save me a little time if they happened to be in the right places. Fortunately they were so I didn’t have to do any drilling at all initially. Because I wanted the tool to be versatile and be able to give me a range of radiuses though I decided to make the holes for the metal roller bearings slightly oversized. That way I could position each roller how I wanted it.
LEFT: View from the back.
The last thing I needed to do was to make the crank. All this took was a scrap of mild steel flat bar about half an inch wide, a few nuts and another bolt. The reason I used a few nuts is that the bolt I found to secure the plywood disk to the backing board and the crank just happened to be a bit too long so, rather than cut it down, I used a larger nut or two as a spacer. I cut the bar to length, put a couple of bends in it (which you can see in the bottom pic) and rounded over the edges so that they wouldn’t dig into my hand as I used the crank. Once that was done the fret bender was finished!
This tool is a very low-tech affair but it works surprisingly well and has served me faithfully over the past 15 years. Best of all it was completely free!
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