How to Make a Guitar Nut from a Blank

[Music] hi I'm Dan and this is my apprentice Elise and today we're gonna have a great trade secret and it's all about how to make a guitar nut why would you have to make a guitar nut on a good guitar well because they wear out if you think about it guitar strings especially metal ones are like little files that have the string windings that wear away the material every time you tune change I imagine if you had a time lapse camera that was in close you could see those strings drop and drop and drop until they bust on the first fret and you know there are priests lot of nuts we sell them at still Mac that will pretty much drop into a guitar once you take the old one out but they don't always fit every guitar and they won't suit every action height so there's a lot of reasons why you want to make your own nut we're talking about making a good nut from a nut blank nut blanks are slightly oversized and they come in many different materials and you can customize your not exactly how you want it now just to warn you there are some things that can go wrong when you're making a nut you can blow a nut when you spend a couple of hours very carefully filing the slots and getting get just where you want that last little stroke goes to dupe and one slots drop solo it's buzzing on a fret at that point you really have to start over over the years I've had many apprentices in my shop and a rite of passage for them is to be able to make a good nut the lease has been a quick learner and making nuts in fact she just got her highest merit badges and about to graduate so I think she's the right person to teach this lesson take it away Elise alright so today I'm gonna be working on this Gibson Les Paul Junior I'll be removing the current nut which is a slightly worn bleached bone nut what I'd like to do is use an unbleached phone nut because I really like the way they look complements the headstock and the fingerboard there are other materials you could work with for example you could use tusk plastic metal but in the shop we really love working with bone because it's dense and durable but light not too hard to work with alright my friends let's begin by knocking out this old nut just using a small hammer and straightedge here just came right out as you can see right here my slots already pretty cleaned out which is awesome because that saves you a lot of time a lot of trouble I'm just going to use a small chisel to go in and get the leftover glue and smudge that's on the sidewall my next step is to make sure that my blank is exactly square otherwise you can have issues down the road a little bit I'm gonna use a machinist square and align it right up to the corner of the square and I can see a blank is not exactly square and it's easy to stand off that little bit of excess with some sandpaper that should be good my next step now is to fit my blank into my slot I'm using calipers to measure the nut slot and my nut at three different points and it's looking like my blank is just slightly too thick so once again I'll use some sandpaper I'm making sure to put an even amount of pressure on all sides of the blank alright cool so I'm right in the ballpark I need to be so now I'm gonna check and see if it fits the slot and this is looking like a perfect fit to me it's nice and snug but easy enough to remove for working on next I'm using a radius gauge to check the radius of the fingerboard and some calipers to check our fret height now we're going to use those two very important measurements to mark our blank at this point I'll use a number of different size feeler gauges and add up to the fret height which for us is 47,000 and then add another 10 thousandths on to that that gives us a little bit of a buffer to work with because I can always take off more height later alright got that marked now I just want to circle back and retrace my radius and then now you see we have that crisp line so we know where to sand to let me after what at least just showed you she measured the fret height and then stacked some feeler gauges on the fingerboard equaling that height she added another feeler gauge to raise that height and trace the line to indicate the top of the nut then she double check to make sure she's matching the curve of the guitars fretboard with a radius gauge this roughs in the shape of the nut there's another tool we have it's tumeric that the R&D shop has come up with it's called the safe slot and it's a little padded yoke that fits right up against the nut and you can slide feeler gauges through it clamp that down that the height you want and file until it touches the metal sort of protects the nut area to Stu max Eliot John Connery a great repairman has done a great video on how to use this there's a link in the description below check it out now when you're using the belt sander you always want to make sure you have a proper angle I am gonna sit down so I can look directly at my pencil line and my nut so I know how much to take off especially when it comes to rounding another trick Dan taught me is to keep the tips of your fingers wet and that way the moisture can give you a nice grip on the bone [Music] I'm happy with this because I can see the rounding came out really well and it got as close as I could to the line without going any farther I'm now gonna move on to the step of identifying my string spacing I'll put my nut back in the slot and go ahead and restring the bass in the treble e and this is a critical step marking her outside ease so just to be sure I'm all good here I've asked Dan to come over and give his opinion and he's always happy to do it that's probably a little wider towards the edges I like you got a fret and a neck and then you got this bevel I like to be measuring from the Bell the edge of the bevel not the actual width of the neck I'm gonna put it where I think it should sit on this neck it's 1/16 of an inch in from the bevel and that's good and this one's gonna be the same and you can't tell unless you look right down from the top on the right track good luck thank you Dan call me if you need me all righty so I'm gonna go ahead and mark each side of the strings to mark the rest of my string spacing I'm using this very handy string spacing rule if you're making a lot of nuts this is a must-have tool find the point where the two outside strings line up and then the rest of the string spacing is measured out for you there we go before we start slotting I'm just gonna add a little tape for protective measure just in case the file slips or anything like that so I'm not gonna start filing real deep right away at first I'll just make some starter slots to get us going and you always want to position yourself as directly over the fingerboard and the nut as possible so you're able to get that straight line now that we have started our slots we're gonna be moving on to slotting our depth we're going to be using the Stu Mac nut slotting files these files come in different gauges that correspond to whatever gauge strings you are using in our case we are going to be working with light gauge strings so we'll use the appropriate files for those measurements let's go ahead and get our strings back on to tension and I'll be starting with a base E string slot as I file I'm going back and forth of it instead of just straight down this is side filing and it creates a nice round bottom for the strings to sit in instead of a sharp v-shape [Music] my action is still quite high so I know I'll eventually need to slot a bit deeper but let's save that for later for now I'm going to take off the extra material from the sides of the nut standing over the nut trace the shape of the headstock down to the fretboard to help give you a nice accurate line I'll be using a razor first and then a pencil so that when I go to Soph the ends that little notch will help me get a clean cut going to be using a nut and saddle vase oh that's worse than nails on a chalkboard as we can see right here and are not even at all and they look kind of sloppy from the hacksaw I'm just going to use some coarse and fine ste Mac files to try to file the ends more evenly still a little rough but I'll get that with some sanding later let's move on now to checking how much height we need to shave off so you'll know when you have to take off more height when you see that the string is completely sitting inside of that slot that's what's going on right here and you don't want that what you want to aim for is having about half the string depth sitting in your slot but with the thinner unwound strings like the G B and E strings they need to sit a little deeper in the slider they can pop out close to the full diameter of those strings will sit in the slot instead of just half [Music] all right cool we are ready to slot our final depth now I want to say a little bit about back filing once you've gotten to the depth that's time to stop going deeper and start to clean it up the bat-file that filing gives you a controlled rounded point so that just like the shape of the nut that's coming up on the Johno curve the string follows that so it has a good deal of meat at the front edge you can actually point it at the angle of the peg data to the tuning post because that's where the string is going now it's time for a final test and this action is right where I want it that's about perfect now it's time to move on to rounding and polishing our final steps what you're really doing here is just smoothing out those edges with a fine-toothed file making sure you have that final shaping just how you want it I'll follow up with some sandpaper to get those scratches out I am working from 400 to 600 to 800 this is looking good and feels super smooth let's polish this thing and make it shine I'm using the micro mesh stick which is awesome because it has three fine grits built into one tool it's pretty much all you need to make this thing look like a piece of jewelry there we have it now it's time for us to glue and the nut finally so I'm gonna be using just a few droplets of original Titebond that's really all it needs put some string tension on waiting for this nut to dry it with tight bond it should typically take about half-hour to an hour if you're finished working on it for the day just leave it for overnight giving it the final check-over and then he leaves did a really good job string spacing is just the way I showed her and wanted nice low action and it's polish like a jewel now there are some details I'm going to point out that she could practice more on in the future she sand it a bit too much you can really see it around the low e-string slot it looks a little more rounded than I want to see it sure feel good on the hand though the slot tips look good on the a and E strings they're about half as deep as a string diameter this g string slot looks good but the B string slot is just a little too deep I think and it looks like it may have been back filed a little too steep of an angle you can see some scratches on the top that's left over from sanding or filing those could have been sanded out before polishing in the nut still just a little wide for the slot it's hard to see because of the roundness but it's sticking out just a touch for comparison here's another Gibson style nut this one's on an early wine guitar a recent replica of the guitar I built for blues me and Albert King in the 1970s taking a close look here the edges of the bone are smooth not to the point of looking round you can see the wound string sitting halfway into their slots and the thinner unwound strings are sitting a little deeper the lines on the top here aren't scratches those are the natural grain of the bone itself so wheelies did a great job and she's learning fast it takes years to become a pro at this job but she made a beautiful nut that works great on this guitar and it's more than satisfactory at my blog guys once your community release we like to give you a diploma that you've graduated to the next level and we're just so proud thank you so much Dan ah this doesn't come easy by the way you have to practice a lot right yeah you won't get it right on the first nut you make but practice makes perfect and you proved it thank you especially Dan [Applause]

Channel: StewMac

Views: 173,674

Rating: 4.9238172 out of 5

Keywords: guitar nut, guitar nut replacement, guitar nut filing, guitar bone nut, guitar nut electric, electric guitar nut replacement, guitar nut files set, guitar nut removal, guitar nut slot depth, how to make a guitar nut, guitar nut making, guitar nut string spacing, make a guitar nut, custom guitar nuts, how to make a guitar nut from scratch, how to make a guitar nut from bone, nut blank, how to make a guitar nut at home, dan erlewine, lutherie, stewmac_guitar, heystewmac

Id: im1Qw2CI8BQ

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020