By Our Review of the D'addario Fret Polish Kit - Does it improve my Guitar!
Introduction
I recently purchased a pack of D’addario (Planet Wave) Fret Polish Kit on Amazon. It cost me £9 with shipping! I recently found that the frets on the Harley Benton were a bit “Gritty”, so I thought this is the perfect chance to try and review these D’addario Fret Polish Kit. They are cheap and look fairly easy to use and I couldn’t think of a better guitar to try them out on.
We are going to polish all our frets and let you know not only how easy the kit is to use but also what kind of results we get from it. Is it worth £9? Will it improve your guitar? Let’s find out together!
What’s in the box
Not a lot! You get 5 Sheets of “Reusable” Polishing Paper and that is about it. The packet that it comes in does turn into a handy fret guard. For this review, I won’t be using that, I will be using painters tape.
Also, it says they are reusable, So we will see how “Reusable” they are. Apart from that, you don’t get a lot else in the box at all. On to the polish and restring.
Preparation
As we have mentioned above we are going to take the strings completely off a tape up the entire fretboard. I am also going to tape up the pickup as we are going to be dealing with metal and I just want to be extra careful. If you were going to give this a go I would highly recommend you get a fret guard! Taping every fret is a right pain!
Polishing
As far as polishing the actual frets, Once I had taped up the fretboard, the process of polishing couldn’t be easier! You take the Rougher side of the polishing cloth and just rub it on the fret. It is so simple, any anyone of any skill level will be able to do it.
Doesn’t take long to do all the frets. The way I did them is done a rough pass first, then went back and done another pass on all the frets. Very simple and easy to do and also very quick.
Results
What kind of results can you expect from the D’addario Fret Polish Kit? Well, as you can tell by the photos they are night and day! I was amazed at the difference that it made. The Fretboard looks completely different once I finished. It makes it look like a guitar worth a lot more money. After I finished every fret was shiny and you could tell the difference from how they started.
So they look nice, But does it improve the playing? Well, as far as I can tell, yes! Bends are a lot smoother and that horrible “gritty” noise has disappeared. The fretboard overall feels a lot smoother and easier to play.
One thing I was amazed by was how much grime and dirt was on the Polishing pad when I had finished! You could easily see how much grime it had taken off the frets. As we said at the beginning, They do say these pads are reusable. I would say you will be able to use them a few times (until the Polishing pad is covered in Dirt and Grime) but you will have to throw them out in the end, However, 5 pads should last you a long time.
Conclusion
What do we think of the D’addario Fret Polish Kit? We highly recommend you give it a go! For under £10, you can clean and improve your guitar without having to do too much work. We highly recommend using the D’addario Fret Polish Kit on budget guitars where the fretwork and fret finishing might not be up to par.
As we said in the intro, the frets on this guitar felt a little gritty, and when bending you could hear it after we had finished using the D’addario Fret Polish Kit this had gone! I think I will be looking to do this a few times a year to all my guitars from now on. If you have used the D’addario Fret Polish Kit, let us know what you think over on our Instagram.
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