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It is finally Iwasawa time again, and that means it is time to restring our main guitar…

Here she is before doing anything.

This time round we're going to unwind the strings rather than cutting them. Cutting them is a hassle and wasteful, I don't know why we developed that habit.

Ernie Balls

You probably can't see it in the photo, but every string has discolouration at regular, fret-spaced intervals.

Finger grime and fret wear.

Dry paper towel removed some of the grime.

I paused to make and eat dinner, I'm back now.

New for this restringing is that we bought this fingerboard oil and fret polishing kit a while back (that was together with that J-bass, the one we owned for only two hours…). I think I'll do the fret polishing first, it's messier.

Snug fit with the biggest guard on the first fret. With the flash on our phone camera, you can really see the fretwear, huh.

The fret on the right (the first fret) has been polished, the fret on the left (the second fret) has not. It's really hard to take a photo of this, but you can see here that the oxidation has been cleaned up by the polishing. But it hasn't fixed the scratches and grooves.

Taking photos, writing alt text and tweeting on three different websites makes this whole process a lot slower. I'm going to just do the polishing for the rest of the frets now.

I think scratches and grooves are something we may deal with using fret rubbers, but not this time.

An hour and a half later, the frets are all polished. They are shiny… but they were also shiny before under direct illumination, so this photo doesn't really show you very much. I like the bokeh and grain in the background though.

Polishing process observations:

• The guard works, but it can't do miracles. The polishing compound will nonetheless end up on the fretboard, you will have to wipe it off, and paper towel is more effective at this than the cloth.
• The oxidised metal becomes fretboard dirt.

Here's another flyby, now that the frets have been polished and I've used some of that oil on the fretboard. Alas, in different lighting.

Trying to legibly photograph fretwear with a smartphone camera is an utterly agonising activity. I'm not posting the attempts here.

I think six hours is long enough spent focusing on microscopic details for one day. I'll do the actual restringing tomorrow.

Time to actually string the guitar.

Too many winds on the low E… but we'll live.

After putting on the low E, A and D strings, I decided to try playing with just those on, and oops, an hour and a half disappeared.

This is destroying the pick…

All done!

I believe this is too many winds, so I think we need to stop measuring out two posts' worth of extra string when restringing with the method we're using. Maybe one post would be enough.