A Guitar And Gear Support Forum

Recently I bought a short scale SX Furrian in sea foam green. Really nice. I like it a lot.

Shortly after taking it out of the box and playing it for an hour or so, I noticed my fingers were hurting, and not in the "I practiced too much - sore finger tips" way. It was higher up on the finger, about half way up the first knuckle, and more toward the inside of the finger. I looked and looked with my naked eyes. I couldn't see anything, but I could definitely feel something, and it didn't feel good. It felt something like a paper cut, but a little different.

I am aware that my eyes are pretty bad these days - I have Tri-focals... I've "graduated" past Bi-focals, lol. So I grabbed my little, direct-from-China-via-eBay, "hand-held digital microscope," which is actually more like a really good digital magnifying glass, with which you can take screen captures. After searching around for just a few seconds, I found several of what you see in the attached picture. That is a picture taken with the "digital microscope." It is a teeny-tiny, invisible to the naked eye, metal splinter. I had several of them. One of them was quite larger than what you see, and stuck in my skin like a sharp little spear. I could clearly see it penetrating down into the skin. I didn't get a capture of that one. To this day, I still have a couple that I couldn't get out, and I can still feel them. It's nothing really painful, but I am aware of them, and the feeling can be annoying at times.



I figure these are tiny shavings from the guitar factory that are left behind after they install and dress the frets (in whatever manner they may dress them). I guess they don't really wipe the fingerboard down before boxing the guitar.

So this is just a cautionary tale, I guess... beware of the tiny metal splinters in your fingers! Wipe down your fingerboard before you play a brand new guitar!

Running a magnet over the fretboard probably a good idea...steel wool residue is likely culprit

I was destroying an old hard drive that was no longer functional enough to do a software wipe on it, so I opened it up, pulled the discs out with heavy duty pliers and bent the absolute crap out of them with same pliers and hammer, also taking a screwdriver and scraping the surfaces as much as I could. I wound up with a few little slivers like that when I was cleaning up my "work" area.

BTW, this was a 3.5" Seagate HDD and those things are built tough as nails. Found two very powerful smallish magnets inside there as well. I kept those.

But those tiny metal slivers are surprisingly painful for their size.

Ouch, kind of like getting your hands full of fiberglass insulation slivers. I was thinking of ordering one of those cheap Grote's on Amazon...i'll remember your finger if I do and clean it up good first!

Never got that from a guitar. It's true how much pain or irritation something so tiny can cause

So they will work themselves out shortly, but if not soon enough, the ER/living in cactus country trick is wax. Like remove hair wax. "No-tweeze" is a good choice.

Or soaking it in Peroxide, sometimes the fizz will lift it out—I've got one in the pad of my left thumb right now, and no amount of probing around with a needle seems to want to shift it