34346 Refret?

[Paul Childs]

Just thought, 34346 being 52 years old must have had several refrets by now to still sound & play perfectly?
Hope it doesn't go like Eric Clapton's 'Blackie' did (Read it years ago now in Guitarist) that it couldn't take another refret.

[JimN]

I've still got a 1965 Burns Marvin (which at one time was my only guitar) and it's never needed a re-fret (though Roberto Pistolesi did a beautiful fret-dress job on it for me - and replaced the badly-pitted zero-fret).

It's hard to see how Eric Clapton's guitar would be - or could get into - in such dire straits. How many times will it have been refretted since the mid-1950s? Once? Twice? Three times absolute maximum (but it's not likely to have been as many as that, surely?).

It's equally hard to see why Eric's guitar couldn't be refretted again if necessary. Every skilled luthier is familiar with the phenomenon of the loose fret slot, and they all have remedies for it. At worst, the slots can be re-filled with a glue/wood-dust mix and left to dry, then the slots re-cut and the neck re-fretted in the normal way. It isn't magic, it's just skill and the laws of science (principally physics), but the "My guitar is unique and might not exist for much longer" story does also have a special magic or mojo of its own.

JN