ON GUARD

Say goodbye to taping up your fingerboard with a new full-face protector. A gizmo too far or a worthy addition to your tool kit?

This modding lark ain’t cheap and I don’t just mean the price of those high-end, hand-wound pickup sets you plan to install. The more jobs you tackle, invariably, the more specialist tools you might need. And rather like those pedals you thought were a good idea at the time (and now sit in your gear locker), specialist tools might rarely get used. Then again, slowly building up your tool set – even if you plan to do no more than maintain, fix and mod your own guitars – is, for many, all part of our hobby.

For example, the latest addition to MusicNomad’s increasingly broad range of tools and guitar care products, which are aimed at everyone from kitchen-table modders to full-time guitar makers, is the Fret Shield Fretboard Protector Guard, a 0.008-inch thick piece of stainless steel designed to drop over your fingerboard to protect it while you carry out any fret fettling, where previously you’d have used tape to protect the face of the fingerboard.