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This was in fact the hardest thing for me to do. I had no
template, no experience, no proper tools and no one to turn to
except the internet - so that's exactly what I did.
This little bone nut (believe it or not) took me about 3 days
of work off and on until I knew it was basically right. Until I
fitted the tuning pegs etc there was no setting the nut up
properly, but just to get the basic size, and fit for me was
hard... here's what I did.
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As you can see if you look carefully, there
was a hole for the nut, but the nut was far too wide, too
thick, too high, well just about as basic a piece of bone that
you can get. The Allen key was for truss rod adjustments. I
started off by cutting the nut with a hack saw just slightly
too wide for the neck.
Next I rubbed the thickness of the nut on fine sand paper
until it would just fit the groove in the neck.
I then used a pencil to follow the contour of the neck and
mark the nut for further shaping. |
| The bone on the nut blank is
actually quite hard - I suppose it has to be really to last a
long time in it's job on the neck. After a very long time of
messing about with sandpaper and wet or dry sanding paper I
found another way of shaping the nut.
I bought a 'dremmel' and a sanding head. It fetched this
nut in to the basic shape in about 30 minutes and saved me
days! |
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Look at the finished thing and you can see
that the nut is a good fit and I basically got the strings to
be reasonably even spaced. In fact they are much better than
the picture reveals.
For the string grooves I fitted the tuning pegs, strung the
neck reasonably loosely and marked the string positions with a
pencil.
I did not spend a fortune on files either - the ones I used
cost around £3.00 ($US 5.00) and are available anywhere & made
in Taiwan! |
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Here's a shot of the finished peg head just
to confirm how good the nut really is. I did spend some time
setting up the string heights at the nut. If this is wrong,
you will get either cheese grater finger (ooh) or fabulous
string buzz to last forever.
Check the internet for how to set up the string height at
the nut - it's easy and you can use a feeler gauge for the
height adjustment. |
The nut was only completely finished subsequent to the
finishing of the neck with the fitting of the tuners, the logo and
the finish so be aware that the nut is one of those jobs to spend
time on and you have to keep on coming back to the fitting at
different stages of the overall build of your dream guitar.
Like I said, buy two - it's easy to get this wrong, but just as
easy to get it right the second time. Once again for all you
guitar tech's there must be an easier way, but I did it MY way...
so there.
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