This is a Fender Eric Clapton Strat built in 1990 that I bought myself for my 30th birthday as it was the same age.
I played it a bit and this happened. Not sure if it was already damaged and I made it worse or if the old strings caused the damage. There was no noticable damage when I bought it.
Is this type of thing possible to fix? Or will it need a new neck?
Thank you! (First post on Lemmy!)
Others have commented on fixing the inlay, but I noticed there's also some dings and divots in the frets themselves. In case that's what you're referring to, those are also entirely fixable. Divots like those can cause buzzing or dead frets. If that's not happening to you, then no need to bother fixing them.
To fix that, you would need to run a sharpie over the top of the fret then file it until most of the sharpie is gone. Repeat until the divot is no longer there. Next, you sharpie it one more time, but this time you're crowning the fret so the top is round instead of flat. There's tons of YouTube videos that show the technique for doing this. It can be a little tricky. Then you'd polish it up so it's nice and smooth.
If the dents are deep enough, you might need to replace the fret completely which is also entirely doable, but will require some more tools to cut the fret ends and pull the original fret out.
I feel it's worth clarifying that you cannot file one fret like this. You will need to lower all the frets in unison hence the sharpie. I figure you probably meant that I just wanted to clarify before somebody files down a single fret and wonders why they can't produce the correct note in that position anymore.