How To Make A Nut For A Guitar

hi this is Chris at Highline handmade guitars located in beautiful sunny Colorado you know sometimes I feel like a nut and sometimes I don't but today I feel like a net which means I'm going to make a nut for this guitar so without further ado let's get started okay so the first step is to find a blank that will fit this guitar I always carry a stock of different size bone blanks that way regardless of the guitar that I'm building I am pretty confident I can find a blank in the assortment that I've got that'll fit that particular guitar oftentimes when I'm building a guitar I'll plan for specific sized shelf or slot for one of the nuts that I already have that way I don't have to run the risk of not having something available and then having to order it which can slow down the process I use bone this is just a piece of bleached white bone blank and that's my favorite material you can also use there's a variety of other materials like graphite is really popular there's brass Corian there I think you can get some exotic materials like buffalo horn and pre-ban ivory and things like that the one bit of advice I can give you about buying a blank especially a bone that blank is to make sure that it's real bone I know and or at least I've heard some rumors about blanks coming out of different parts of the world that are actually bone dust that's been mixed with glue and compressed into a mold so that's to me is just a recipe for disaster so when you buy a blank you want to make sure that you're buying it from a quality source also I think it's really important especially if you're doing nuts for the first time to pick up a couple of blanks there's a good chance that the the first one you make is not going to be just exactly right you may make the slots too deep it may not fit properly whatever I think it's a good idea to have a couple of blanks so that you know in case something goes wrong you can grab another blank and keep going once you've selected a blank it needs to be sized to fit and there's a couple of ways you can do it this particular guitar I have a shelf that the nut will sit on so I can actually work on that shelf get it perfectly flattened and true from one side to the other I can't work the face of this fretboard in here the reason is is because the distance from where the nut face will be to the center of the first fret is you know part of the scale length so if I start to work down that wood I'm shortening the scale lengthen I don't want to do that so an alternative is to actually work on the face and the bottom of the nut to get it to fit properly now when I say fit properly what I mean is you don't want the nut when you set it down into the slot or onto the shelf to tip or to rock it has to lay down there and fit perfectly flush and there can be no gaps this is critical for getting great sustain if there are gaps you're not going to get the you're not going to realize the guitars full potential for sustain so it's important to make sure everything fits and it doesn't move once it's in that position a trick you can do is if you're getting or having problems getting the fit and things are rocking or tipping or whatever you can rub some pencil lead onto the bone blank set it down and then just gently slide it back and forth and when you take it off you'll see where the high spots are in the wood and then you can take those down and the tools that I like to use when working on this shelf are I use a sharp or inch chisel and you know I can just work the wood that way one of my favorite tools those a Japanese you Asaka file each of the teeth on this thing is like a razor-sharp plane and the nice thing is is it has a ground smooth edge so I can set that against my fretboard and just do just lightly work the area the key here is and this is true for the entire process of making the net its gradual we don't want to jump all the way to the finish size right off the bat we want to gradually reduce the bone and the wood until we get the perfect fit the reason is is if you try to go too far too quickly you can go too far too quickly and the end result is is you end up with a nut that's not going to work the same is also true when we go to shape the nut we're going to do this very gradually we're going to start out big and then bring it in and then once we get to the final shape then we're ready to do the last bit of sanding and polishing we don't want to mark it out and cut it exactly to shape right off the bat because when you do that you really run a risk of making a nut that's not going to fit properly it's the strings will sit too close to the frets and you'll just you'll have to start over so and now we're ready to go on to the next step and that's to shape the nut okay so the first step is to mark the boundaries of the nuts shape and I like to use it looks like just a regular pencil but in truth it's been ground flat so it's actually half a pencil and this is really useful for getting in close now I'm just going to mark the outside edges and that's really going to be more for reference at first then we lay the pencil down flat onto the fret wire right up to the edge press it against the nut and then we draw a line what this line is going to represent is really the lowest point of the slot if we were to actually make the slot go down to that and touch that line our strings would touch the top of these frets so we draw that line is just to give us a visual cue on where the lowest possible point will be for the strings and then that way when we shape we can actually make the shape of the net about a sixteenth of an inch taller and I'll do the same on the sides and then later on I'll gradually bring it down to the final size so that's kind of what you get as you can see the nut is quite a bit larger than it actually needs to be but as I said before we're going to start out big and then gradually make it smaller until the size is just right before we can continue on with fabricating the knot we need to string the guitar here's a tip after you string the guitar up and you clip off the excess string don't throw those pieces away hold on to these make great string gauges for determining our action height then I'll explain that a little bit later but for now our next step is to establish our string spread of the nut and then we can start to form the slots now I'm ready to establish the string spacing on the net or the string spread and I'm sure there's some mathematical formulas out there that people use that would take into account this exact gauge of each string and so on and so forth but I find what works really well is just to use a Stewart McDonald string spacing ruler and I'm not going to get into the specifics of how to use the ruler if you buy one it's got instructions on how to use it but I in my opinion this is the best way to get started and getting your strings spacing set and then you can go back in and visually tweak it but once I've got my string spacing set according to the ruler I can then go back in and file a starter slot for each string and what I do is I take a ten-thousand nut slotting file and then I just position it underneath where the string was originally positioned and I just form a very shallow starter slot and if you listen carefully you can hear it pop into the slot and I will do the same thing with each string once I'm done I'll go back and I'll look at it visually and check to make sure that the spacing appears as accurate as the ruler was telling me sometimes because of different gauge strings you might have to make some slight adjustments from what you got with the ruler which will help you to get a more accurate positioning of the strings for example I'm finding that this one needs to move a little bit over and closer to the high e because it visually looked a little bit off so I'll just move this over to the next slot - or to the new slot and that looks much better so at this stage we're ready to proceed to the next step which is to actually start forming our nut slots these starter slots as you can see they're just right on the very top of the nut but you know that's that's the kind of string action that can split open a finger no matter how thick your calluses are I'm ready to cut the nut what we're going to do is is I'm going to cut each slot each string and I'm going to use my nut slotting files and I've picked these up I think most of these came from Stu Mac if you don't have a set of nut slotting files and you really intent on doing this what you can do is go out and buy some feeler gauges from an auto parts store and then use a dremel with a grinding disc and then cut teeth then you can use the appropriate size gauge just to cut your slots on the thicker ones you might have to sandwich few together another thing you can do is if you saved your wound strings as you can actually use those but that's a real cheeseball way of doing it I really recommend you invest in a set of nuts slotting files so I'm going to start by doing the high E string which is going to be a ten thousandth of an inch slot and we'll just start out gradually cutting now because we're going to have to go fairly deep into the nut it's a good idea to kind of as you're working kind of move the file side-to-side at an angle to keep it a little bit lighter this is where things get kind of complicated when you're making these slots the idea is to create a break point right at the front of the nut face where the string comes off and heads to the bridge in a perfect world at both the bridge in the net you would want to have a knife edge for the string to come off of but this is a practical because with a bone nut a knife edge is going to wear down really quick it's also going to cause problems with string breakage so what we need is to have is narrow a contact patch as possible between the string and the nut but we don't want it to be so sharp that it can cause this problem so we have to find a happy medium and for those of you out there who are experienced at doing a lot of guitar repairs you probably have noticed there are times when you have a guitar with a string that sounds like a sitar and oftentimes that's because there's way too much contact going on between the nut and the string so what we need to do is we need to form the groove form the slot and then as we get to the final death we start to angle it down and that way as the string comes off the tuner it comes up and touches the not just at the very front of it before it leaves for the bridge and along the side you want it to gradually work away from the string so that there isn't as much contact more the more contact there is the more you lose sustain that the more the string starts to sound like a sitar so hopefully I can show as I'm forming these that we're going to start out flat but then we're going to kind of angle down and then we're going to kind of work the sides so that it's there isn't you know an excessive amount of contact but at the same time we don't want the string just to move around too much in the slot either so you know this is one of those things that actually takes quite a bit of experience to get it exactly right but if you understand the principles of how the slot and a nut should be formed it's not that difficult to do it so I've been sawing away here for a few minutes and every so often I'll stop and drop the string back in to check to see how deep the slot is one way that I like to check is to press down the string just behind the second fret and then tap it down to the first fret and ideally what we want is just barely any clearance there right now there's still quite a bit but I think at this stage I'm done with that first fret and now or that first string so now I can move on to the B string and start to lower that one down all right well the preliminary slots have been cut and now the next step is to remove the nut and I'm going to take it back to the belt sander and I'm going to further refine the shape remember this is a gradual process so we're getting there now one of the things that I'm trying to do is I shape this nut is I'm trying to it's hard to see but I'm trying to grind it down into a kind of a fall off towards the tuner side and then that's really more for an aesthetic reason and then I'll round off some of these edges so that they won't crack and chip away but it's getting close of course there's quite a bit of hand sanding involved mostly on that top radius and then on these corners that I want to round over bone is somewhat brittle and if you're not careful your stranger tools can catch and crack out pieces so you want to try to take down some of those sharper edges make it nice and the bottom of the face of the nut have to be absolutely flat so I took a piece of sandpaper and I put it on the table of my bandsaw which has been you know precision ground smooth and flat so I'm still using 220 and that's about it I'm going to come back here later and do the same thing again with a finer grit but now what I need to do is go in and do the final slotting and get that to the depths that it needs to be and go from there what I'm doing now is I'm fine-tuning the depth of the slot and I'm starting out at the face end with the file level and then I'm gradually angling it and and pushing it down towards the end and what that does is it it creates a slot that will drop away from the string we want most of the string to contact the bone at the very face of the nut and then we want it to gradually fall away towards the back and and we want to try to reduce the area of contact along both sides and the reason we do that is because when there's too much contact it tends to to mute the sustain in the string now in case you're wondering how do you know how deep to go with the slot you know when are you finished deepening the slot there's a couple of different ways you can use a feeler gauge but feeler gauges are kind of awkward to use because of their width you know it's sort of a trying to get it underneath there and pressing the string down it's it's not a bad way to do it but I don't I don't think it's as easy to do another way is you can there's a Stewart McDonald sells a gauge with a dial indicator on it you can sit on top of there it'll actually tell you how high the string is problem with that is now that ain't cheap what I do is when I clip off my the ends of the strings after I've tuned or after I've strung up the guitar I don't throw those pieces away I keep them because we know that each one of these has a specific diameter that we that were aware of so what I do is for the the e b and g string i usually will go anywhere from ten thousandths of an inch up to about fourteen thousand seven-inch so what I I'll do is I'll take a string that hat it's a ten string a ten thousandth of an inch string and I'll slide that right under along the center and then just press that string and if it's if it's you know if it's perfectly at the perfect depth the string is going to be sitting right on top of my little scrap string if it's still too high you can see the string move up and down so I'll just keep working these and I'll do I'll do a ten thousandth for this string probably a twelve thousand string for this one and then a fourteen for that one then on this string I'll jump to about an eighteen and then a twenty and then a twenty-two it doesn't have to be exactly perfectly on that but fairly close and everybody has a slightly different idea of what they think is good action here but that's what I think is is a general all-purpose action setting for all intents and purposes this nut is done I could install it on the Garga tar right now string up everything and we'd be good to go but you know that's that's just not good enough we need to put a polish on this thing so I've got three sheets of sandpaper here I've already done 220 so I'm going to do 400 600 800 and at that point I can get a I can buff out a really nice shine so and it doesn't take much you know we don't need to spend a lot of time on each grip it's pretty fast all right so the final step now is going to be to buff it up to a nice glossy shine okay this is the last step I promise we're going to glue the nut to the shelf and I'm going to use just some gap-filling CA glue and I'm going to put a drop onto the shelf here it doesn't take much and you don't want to get it too close to the edge or it'll squeeze out and this stuff is kind of messy now some people will say super glue why would you use super glue because it's super and it's an easy product to work with you decide later on to get rid of her to take the net off it's just a matter of heating the nut a little bit which breaks the the bond of the super glue and that's really all there is to it a little bit of squeeze out there with it's no big deal okay now just tighten down the strings which will serve as clamping pressure for the net and then we are dead

Channel: Highline Guitars

Views: 86,317

Keywords: Electric Guitar (Musical Instrument), Acoustic Guitar (Musical Instrument), nut, bone, brass, corian, graphite, neck, fretboard, fingerboard, fret, bridge, tremolo, pickup, humbucker, Fender Stratocaster (Guitar), Fender Telecaster (Guitar), Gibson Les Paul (Guitar)

Id: jEdjBYsnpBk

Length: 24min 59sec (1499 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 23 2014