This bloodwood fretboard is getting hemispherical fret ends, which many players find to be very comfortable. A more accurate description is “semi-hemispherical” but that is a little too unwieldy. Shaping and fitting them is a lot more time consuming than other fretting techniques but the result justifies the effort. The workbench photo shows the setup that I use, which involves quite a few tools and steps to get it right. Each fret is trimmed to the proper length since they are minutely set back from the edge of the board to accommodate a very slight round-over. This is done before the shaping steps and after the fret tang is removed with a special nipper and cleaned up with the filing jig in the lower left corner of the photo. Shaping of each rounded fret end is done with various tools and sandpaper. Final polishing is done with a 6" buffing wheel and rouge. It takes quite a while to do this 38 times but you get into a rhythm.
