Fred Edge Dressing, Cheap

This fretboard is bound by a strip of black plastic.  I could have taken this opportunity to trim the frets to size and snip their tangs to preserve the binding, like you might for a good guitar.  But I chose to extend the fret slots through the binding and do it the easy way.

You can get special tools to allow you to hammer frets over the body of the guitar, but why spend the money on that when you have a large hammer that can also be used for other things?  That big one at the bottom:  you can reach through the soundhole and support the fretboard with it.  It helped that the fret slots were generous in width for the StewMac fret tangs.

I trim the fret ends with a regular end cutter, not a fancy luthier's model.  My whole goal is to avoid buying specialized tools.  When I cut, I push the cutter against the fretboard and then pull it back just a hair, to prevent the fret from getting levered out of its slot by the unsteadiness of my hand as I apply pressure to the cutter handles.  

Then I was left with a row of spikes on both sides of my fretboard.  When I built the neck for the electric, I simply ran a mill file freehand down the sides.  The worst that happened there were a hand cramp, a bloody nick, and the occasional ding on the headstock when I ran the file too far that way.  The acoustic presents one new problem, however:  freehanding it is impossible because the file would repeatedly hit the guitar body where the fretboard goes over it.  

So I made a tool that consists of two clamps holding a mill file to the edge of a board.  The clamps are heavy, so I arranged them in opposite directions.  The file descends only 1/8" below the face of the board, which is run along the fingerboard.  It was heavy as hell but worked perfectly.

The black plastic binding took some damage so I sanded it down with progressively finer grits of paper until I'd taken off the damaged finish material and plastic fuzz.  It's visible but doesn't interfere with function.