Now I see why they call it "fretting"

I waited to set the frets until after I rough fit the necks to the body, and also did all the final shaping and smoothing before I set any frets. I made an error in judgment right from the start here, which gave me a genuine klong (that's a medical term for a rush of shit to the heart). I had to scramble to get back on track, but everything turned out fine.

Flush-cut fret nippers, home made. I took two seldom-used wire cutters and ground their faces halfway through the "blades." The smaller one on the left wasn't robust enough to cut the fret wire at all, but the other one worked fine. Saved about $30 with this, I think.

First, I made a complete set of frets for both guitars, without bending the wire to any radius, undercutting for the binding and some overlap to trim. I thought the curve was so slight I would have no problem pressing them in to fit the curve. Boy, was I wrong. 

Before I started actual fretting, I scraped the slots to remove any crap or glue slop from the bindings. To do this, I ground a hook in a dull shop knife blade, and ground the thickness down a little. This worked great.

DISASTER. The first fret I placed (fret # 1 on my guitar) did NOT bend to the radius of the fingerboard. Or rather, it almost did, but the extensions with the tang removed stayed straight, leaving a gap between them and the fingerboard. I tried to curved them a bit, to no avail. So I removed the fret, and this is what happened.

Having recovered from the klong, I made a little groove-filling shim of aluminum sheet and wax paper, and dribbled in some of than wonderful black epoxy I used for the inlays. Next morning, I sanded the whole fingerboard with the sanding bar, and the holes were practically invisible.

But back to fixing the disaster. I had 43 nicely cut straight frets which would not work unless I could come up with a way to radius them. Here it is - my "fret fixer." The fingerboard is a 12" radius. I guessed at half that (6" radius) for a press to curve tham, figuring a lot of springback. The lower part has a slightly oversize slot for the tang, the upper part has a round mortise for the head. Insert a straight fret and...

...clamp it in the vise. I got really lucky here. Look at all those frets I was able to salvage.

Here's one of the newly-fixed frets, straight from the fret fixer. I'm holding it up against my 12" radius sanding bar to show the slight extra curve, which is just what I wanted. 

From that point on, it was just a matter of pressing them in, with the nifty Stewmac arbor press mounted in my drill press. I added a little bit of titebond, applied to the fret with a toothpick, each time, following Bob Benedetto's advice (which I should have followed about radiusing the frets in the first place).

Here's the fret installed over that "disaster" chipped ebony. It's hard to spot the repair.

I trimmed and filed the ends of the frets, and thus concludes a thorny chapter of this build.