While the whole world of tools has evolved by leaps and bounds, guitar tools have remained stuck in the 1800's.
These archaic tools are incredibly difficult to use because flat sanding beams were never intended for leveling compound radius frets, they were designed for sanding flat wood.
Sanding beams and freehand eyeball guesswork files require extensive practice, and even with high level skills precision is impossible.
Sanding Beams were what they had to work with in the 19th century, back when all fretboards and frets were flat, and fret crowns were barely rounded along the edges, and so it was that flat work on flat frets that a flat beam was deemed good enough.
Radius fretboards were introduced in the 1920's to 1930's by National and Dobro. But it was not until Leo Fender introduced the 7.25" radius in the early 1950s' that the fretboard radius became popularized. That guitar was originally called the Broadcaster, but Gretsch already owned that name, so Leo changed it to Telecaster and the rest is history.
But luthiers and techs did not change their tools or methods to adapt to radius fretboards and frets, with one exception: At about the same time of Leo's Telecaster, also came the first concave fret crowning file. That was the beginning and end of innovative fret tools for many decades to come.
Today's frets have a radius to match the fretboard radius, plus the crown radius, this is a compound radius.
Sanding beams are inescapably destructive to today's frets, they flatten the crown and destroy the radius all while chewing up tons of fret material and they do not in reality level the frets because the beam travels up and down and left and right on the random highs and lows of uneven frets.
After destroying the frets with the sanding beam, luthiers and techs attempt repairing them with a freehand eyeball guesswork hand file, but entirely ignore the long radius along the fretboard width, meaning that the frets are not level across the fretboard width, they do not match the fretboard radius and that can only mean they are not level.
How is this possible that since the 1950's no one has thought to innovate non-destructive tools specifically designed for fret leveling, radiusing, and crowning today's compound radius fret?
The modern advances of tools is to make tools that anyone can readily use to perform work easier and with a high level of precision, without having to invest years of practice learning how to adapt an inappropriate tool to a task it was never designed nor intended for.
Do you know of any other tools that first destroy the workpiece? So why accept this travesty with guitar tools for fret work? Just because luddite luthiers, guitar repair guys, and guitar tool makers refuse to join the 21st century does not mean you owe them allegiance, on the contrary, because they are not your friends, their aim is to bar the rest of us from being able to work on guitars so that we must pay them. This does include the tool makers because they make 31 flavors of the same tools by putting lipstick on pigs and selling them as exotic species... but let's be real, lipstick does not change a pig.
SixStringers is about 21st Century tools specifically engineered for the job that the DIY Novice can use without special training or experience to easily and conveniently achieve ultra precision that tranforms any guitar into a great sounding and pleasure to play guitar.
