Slightly shrunken fretboard: Will oiling help?

imperialbari

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Found a Kala Pocket uke at a very fair price at the site of a European web store. Actually I bought 4 of them for some stringing experiments I am carrying out. All four are quite good, only at one of them I can feel the ends of the frets in my left hand. Not that they stick out 0.5mm or so. They are just noticeable.

My suspicion is that this uke spent a long time in a too dry storage room. I am used to maintaining good recorders with bore oil, but I have no experience in oiling fretboards.

Will the fretboard come loose because the glue is challenged?

Which oil to use? I use almond oil with the recorders, but I don’t know whether it will make the fretboard sticky.

I have bee’s wax balsam that I use for furniture. Would that work?

Klaus
 
Bring the uke in to the bathroom when you take your next long, hot, steam shower. That will help restore moisture. You can also put it in a hardcase or plastic bin with a humidifier or moist sponge placed in a plastic bag with holes.

Regarding the fretboard, I've only ever used lemon oil. Your local store will sell some application-specific stuff but you can also buy it from a hardware store.
 
Ukulele Eddie has offered great advice! Lemon Oil is the accepted standard (even above other oils made for fretboards and sold elsewhere), and can be ordered from StewMac as well. That will only treat the wood, not make it expand.

As for the sharp fret ends, it might be worth sanding down the sharp ends (common issue), as the fretboard is likely to shrink again to its current condition when humidity continues to drop in the future--unless you are planning to keep your ukuleles stored in a humidified atmosphere. They fretboard, even in humid conditions may not expand to its initial size--but it is worth a try!
 
Thanks for the replies!

I tend to wonder why exactly lemon oil is in so widespread usge as a fretboard oil. It has a content of acid, which in my book isn’t very good for the brass or nickel silver frets.

Klaus
 
Thanks for the replies!

I tend to wonder why exactly lemon oil is in so widespread usge as a fretboard oil. It has a content of acid, which in my book isn’t very good for the brass or nickel silver frets.

Klaus

Pure lemon oil is made from lemon rinds and is pH-neutral(not acidic). However, many commercially available lemon oil products have other ingredients, as others have observed.

If you use lemon oil, a drop or two on a soft cloth is more than enough for a fretboard. An oil treatment is unlikely to re-expand a shrunken fretboard. Humidification may help, but also may not, especially if it’s been dry for a long time. Filing down the fret ends may be your best bet.
 
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In my experience, your fret issue has more to do with humidity than it does a lack of fretboard oil. Humidify it and I bet that will take care of the issue.
 
I am extremely happy with my LoPrinzi Fretboard Conditioner.
 
Likely not a good idea that the Kala Pocket ukes came together with little ‘dryer’ bags inside their gig bags. Don’t know the English term for these bags, but they hold chemicals intended to de-humidify the air around them.

As for mineral oils I have some very thin and penetrant valve oil for my brass instruments. Wouldn’t harm the frets, but what about the fluorocarbon strings? Or the glue holding the fretboard and the neck together?

Klaus
 
Just file the frets down, or have it done.

Use lemon oil or take the ukulele with you in the shower to expand the fretboard? C'mon . . .
 
Not IN the shower, but the room where the shower is located. The extra humidity in that scenario can rapidly re-humidify a string instrument.
 
If you have to temporarily expose the instrument to high humidity to make the wood expand, isn't that just a temporary solution? What's stopping the moisture from leaving the wood as "easily" as it got in? What's stopping the wood from contracting again when it's in an arid environment again?

And why would only the fretboard absorb the moisture? So you wrap the rest of the instrument so that it's not exposed to the humidifying effect? Let only the fretboard expand and have no influence on the neck and body it's glued onto? Because fretboards only expand widthwise and not lengthwise?

Seems like (okay, not "filing") sanding the frets down may be a better solution. Tape off the wood, and hit the offensive edges with sandpaper.

How about this. I wouldn't expose any of my instruments to extreme changes in humidity. From my experience, wood, glue, and finish act unpredictably when you subject it to sudden humidity and temperature changes. Metal? Not as much.
 
The issue is that ukuleles should be kept between 40% and 60% relative humidity--with the exception of plastic, eKoa, carbon fiber, and polycarbonate ukuleles. Laminate ukuleles are still made out of wood, and most fretboards are made out of wood. Under 40% humidity, fretboards will shrink leaving sharp fret edges...and on solid ukuleles, there can be even more damage to the ukulele itself.

Once a ukulele hits that 40% to 60% humidity range, it should be stored in that range.

For most people, that means a hard case with an in-case humidifier; for others several room humidifiers; for yet others a large Rubbermaid container with a humidifier. While I live in Wisconsin, our home's humidity has been in the high 30's most of the winter; meaning that my "good" ukuleles (in cases) stay near 50% with an Oasis sound hole humidifier AND a Herco humidifier. I fill them up with distilled water about once a week. My laminate ukuleles are doing okay at that nearly 40% humidity, but if I noticed the house humidity diving, I would go and buy a big container that sealed and put all of my ukuleles in that container for a while.

At school, the humidity level is under 20% with our Caramels. In cases, I keep our four Mainlands and one Bonanza above 40%, but just barely; and I have had to sand fret edges on every Caramel and even our little Lanikai Soprano Banjolele.

As soon as Spring (really) rolls around, humidity will return to acceptable states, the Caramel fretboards will expand,and those frets will be within the fretboard...which is okay. The fretboards cannot shrink any more than they already have.

If you don't want to deal with the frets, there are options from low cost Makala Waterman (new Concert model, incidentally...we have 6 coming), still lower cost Outdoor Ukuleles, some Flea/Fluke models (although they will have a wood top), and of course, high level Blackbird ukuleles.

The moral of the story is that if you can get the fretboard to expand and you don't want to deal with the problem again, invest in a way to keep the instrument humidified. This is true of any wood stringed instrument.
 
An oil treatment is unlikely to re-expand a shrunken fretboard. Humidification may help, but also may not, especially if it’s been dry for a long time. Filing down the fret ends may be your best bet.

what Rich said...:agree:
 
I've seen where a newly glued fretboard absorbed moisture from the glue, then slowly dried out after frets were installed. This created sharp ends after the frets were initially installed and filed.

File the ends.
 
If you have to temporarily expose the instrument to high humidity to make the wood expand, isn't that just a temporary solution? What's stopping the moisture from leaving the wood as "easily" as it got in? What's stopping the wood from contracting again when it's in an arid environment again?

And why would only the fretboard absorb the moisture? So you wrap the rest of the instrument so that it's not exposed to the humidifying effect? Let only the fretboard expand and have no influence on the neck and body it's glued onto? Because fretboards only expand widthwise and not lengthwise?

Seems like (okay, not "filing") sanding the frets down may be a better solution. Tape off the wood, and hit the offensive edges with sandpaper.

How about this. I wouldn't expose any of my instruments to extreme changes in humidity. From my experience, wood, glue, and finish act unpredictably when you subject it to sudden humidity and temperature changes. Metal? Not as much.

No good repair person would ever work on an instrument that is dehydrated. A severely dehydrated uke will cause the top to shrink, lowering the action (Probably the number one cause of buzzing in the winter time) and will have a negative affect on the fret board as well. Proper humidification over a period of a week or two will enable the geometry of the instrument to return to it's original condition and only then can any repairs be made. It's like getting surgery, the doctors won't touch you unless you're in good health. Once the instrument is properly hydrated (following any of the suggestions given here) it's relatively easy to maintain 40% to 60%.
 
So there you go you pro-fret-filers. Try the ounce of prevention before diving in and hacking away at a pound of cure! :cool: Store your instrument at 40-60% Rh, your uke will thank you.
 
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So there you go you pro-fret-filers. Try the ounce of prevention before diving in and hacking away at a pound of cure! :cool: Your uke will thank you.

I didn't see anyone here recommend against proper humidification-- only observing that re-humidifying often will not cure protruding frets. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share it.
 
I didn't see anyone here recommend against proper humidification-- only observing that re-humidifying often will not cure protruding frets. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share it.

My Lanikai starter is a laminate so according to the prevailing wisdom offered by many here, I didn't humidify it because most people said that it was unnecessary to humidify a laminate uke. When the weather started getting cold and the humidity in the house started dropping with the furnace running all the time, I noticed that I started feeling sharp fret edges where I hadn't before. It turns out that they were sharp up and down the entire neck. I made up a couple of sponge/prescription bottle humidifiers and put them in the zippered foam hard case. When I wasn't playing the uke, it was stored in its closed case. Within a week of placing the humidifiers, I could no longer feel any sharp fret edges. I experienced it first hand and remember being pretty surprised that a lack of humidity could make a fretboard shrink that much and that adding a little humidity could make it swell to the point of no longer being able to feel the fret edges.
 
There seems to be a lot of misinformation about lemon oil. 'Lemon oil' sold as a fretboard care product is, as pointed out above, actually just mineral oil. Exactly whose bright idea it was to market it as 'lemon oil' - well, who can say? Mineral oil is very mild stuff - it is not acidic - and products sold under reputable brand names are fine to use.

Other types of lemon oil are probably best avoided. Lemon oil for furniture often (but not always) has some form of wax added and you don't want that getting on your fretboard. Actual lemon oil made from real lemons is mildly acidic and could potentially damage the wood and cause frets to pop loose.
 
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