gogofast
Addicted Member
I have recently started to restore a 83 Dan Smith era two knob Strat. It was badly covered in smoke stink and took me a while to get it out of the wood.
Basically sanded the entire neck and then coated it with tung oil. Same thing for body. All the usual methods failed to get the stink out, but the sun really helped the most.
Getting the smell out was only the beginning. This guitar had cracked nut plus many other things to fix. So, first thing I did was to replace it with Graph Tech TUSQ, but while fitting it, I broke it in half. So I ordered another one, but the string spacing was all wrong. Realized that this particular neck has much wider spacing between treble side strings. I couldn't find any nut to fit right. So only thing left to do was make my own. I have never done this before.
I am using a real ivory piece which came off of 19th century pencil case I had. It was badly damaged beyond repair, so I saved some of the larger pieces for something like this.
Here's the broken piece.
Pieces of ivory.
After about an hour of cutting, grinding, and measuring, here's a rough cut.
Final fitting. I made a mistake of taking too much off the bass side, but looks like it'll still work.
Here's a video of how the guitar sounds. This was before the nut replacement.
https://youtu.be/19sbs72rD3k
I made small cuts on the nut to rest the strings and measure the spacing, but am still waiting for the proper nut file set to arrive.
Here are some questions:
1. Anyone else make your own nuts? I'd appreciate some tricks and tips. Also, I'm pretty new to setting up my own guitars. I took a class, but still a noob, so any sort of old tricks would be much appreciated.
2. Anyone use ivory nut? How does it compare to other materials? Difference in tone, sustain, and etc?
Basically sanded the entire neck and then coated it with tung oil. Same thing for body. All the usual methods failed to get the stink out, but the sun really helped the most.
Getting the smell out was only the beginning. This guitar had cracked nut plus many other things to fix. So, first thing I did was to replace it with Graph Tech TUSQ, but while fitting it, I broke it in half. So I ordered another one, but the string spacing was all wrong. Realized that this particular neck has much wider spacing between treble side strings. I couldn't find any nut to fit right. So only thing left to do was make my own. I have never done this before.
I am using a real ivory piece which came off of 19th century pencil case I had. It was badly damaged beyond repair, so I saved some of the larger pieces for something like this.
Here's the broken piece.
Pieces of ivory.
After about an hour of cutting, grinding, and measuring, here's a rough cut.
Final fitting. I made a mistake of taking too much off the bass side, but looks like it'll still work.
Here's a video of how the guitar sounds. This was before the nut replacement.
https://youtu.be/19sbs72rD3k
I made small cuts on the nut to rest the strings and measure the spacing, but am still waiting for the proper nut file set to arrive.
Here are some questions:
1. Anyone else make your own nuts? I'd appreciate some tricks and tips. Also, I'm pretty new to setting up my own guitars. I took a class, but still a noob, so any sort of old tricks would be much appreciated.
2. Anyone use ivory nut? How does it compare to other materials? Difference in tone, sustain, and etc?