Official Luthiers Forum!

You are very welcome and thanks for the thanks!

Ka-Ching! Thanks Hesh….almost 9 years after your re-post!
Very difficult to master nuts when you only make a handful. I blew the string spacing on the one I’m making but I’m going to go ahead and finish it out for the experience. No need to get in a rush at this point. Pound for pound, this is the most difficult piece of an acoustic to get right. Respect my friend…….

Marked the slot positions with a string spacing scale. I started the slot with an exacto, followed with a razor saw before moving to a fret file. Part of the problem was that I cut the nut to height before the string slots or I could have recovered. I’ll replace the exacto step with a nut file slightly narrower than the scale slot width. And I am going with Hesh’s one-diameter slot depth too….

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Measure Twice,

Karl Borum

Hey Karl thanks for finding this!

What I do is use the SM ruler and I've learned that I can redirect my files for errors that I am making in the space between the slots and walk them to where they need to be.

I had a lot of trouble with nut making so don't feel bad my friend. As a builder we only have the opportunity to make a nut when we finish a new build. Doing fretting is the same, limited deal. Build one a year, that's one nut a year and that's pretty hard to learn and even remember what we've learned.

I don't subscribe to this but I was told a story that is true I've had it verified by the way that at one school, professional Lutherie school it's said you need to make about 100 nuts before you really start to get good and quick at it. You work your tail off for two hours have an great nut and the instructor comes over, picks up the nut, looks at it, says "that's nice" throws it in the trash bin and walks away.

WTH

Anyway I prefer positive reinforcement over the trash bin but the take away from this is that nice, minimalistic, eloquent nut that functions perfectly is NOT easy to make.

Onward and upward

I would have smacked the instructor for wasting material. You can always cut a badly made nut down for a smaller instrument - a uke, a mandolin, etc. Heck - I've butched up nut blanks for Gibson's and later cut them down to fit a Fender. Use the whole thing up - even the powder has its uses.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

I never liked that story either Lutherie should and can be fun.

Ok we are writing Section II of the tutorial, set-up for steel string guitars and will drop it in a new thread this Saturday.

In preparation what you will need to follow along and actually do what is being described is a guitar fully assembled, strung up and tuned to pitch.

You will also need for my methods the StewMac gauged nut files in the appropriate gauges for the stings you like to use. Remember we can make a 0.013" slot nicely with with a 0.013" file but we can make it nicely with a 0.016" file the slot will be sloppy.

If by chance you already have a nut on that has sloppy slots no worries we will be taking the slots down lower more than likely and you can make a slot in a slot which we do all of the time on factory guitars. The slot may start out too wide but if the last several thou of cutting is with the correct file it will be fine.

Thanks

Hello Hesh, thanks for this tutorial!
Learning from you every day , and it's a pleasure every time!

Juergen

Thanks Juergen you made my day! Happy to help.