When I saw this thread I thought, "What the hell??"

The only nut work I've done is glueing it back together....on the guitar of course

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riley

CaptainC

Nuts really are an area that make or break a guitar. Theres a reason a blank costs £3 but fitting it costs £40.
Your ok with shims if your carefull. Generaly what you take out you can put back in, if your carefull.

I really wouldnt advise anyone to muck about or experiment with theirs unless they've had a good bit of prior education. Nuts in particular are a very steep learning curve. Their either right or wrong and like I said before, one pass with a file can be one too many.

Experiment away as long as you make notes and can always return back to a 'zero alteration' point. Thats how we all learn, but baby steps to begin with please. No one wants you to have a wrecked guitar.

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No no and no

Okey-dokey: to be clear about it, this is where that 0.020" measurement I mentioned comes from.

The "official" way of setting the slots on a nut is to take a steel rule and lay it edge on across the top few frets. Then take your feeler gauges and set them to exactly the gap between the fingerboard and the bottom of edge of the ruler - which will therefore be exactly the same height as the frets.

Then you add another 0.020" feeler gauge strip on top of the others and the total is the height the bottoms of your nut slots must be above the fingerboard.

In fact, what you can do is stack up the feeler gauges that way and then place them in front of each slot in the nut in turn. Using your nut files you then just carefully cut the slot downwards untill the file just begins to make contact with the metal of the feeler gauge. Presto, your slots are cut to the perfect depth.

'Course: we ain't going to be doing any of that cutting with a roller nut. But the principle for measuring correct depth to shim to is the same.

This stuff is seldom so hard, so long as we understand what we are doing and work methodically. It's craft, not magic...

Cheers - C

I just checked this again based on your advice. I'm right around that spec, maybe just above. I could pull out the file and try and trim a c-hair off the wood but i suppose it'd be best to wait til i have a spare neck or that David Gilmour strat that's got my name on it. Ha ha ha.

.... and what the heck is this emoticon? looks like an emoticons rear end.

thanks all.


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