beandip
Frito's Better Half
You’ll need your nut material (in this case, bone). A hacksaw, pencil, radius gauge, double cut mill file, thin blade saw, various grits of sandpaper, radius gauge, feeler gauge, and a set of needle files. All of this can be purchased at your local tool emporium for about 30 bucks total.
Don’t worry if I have more files than you do. They usually come in sets of 8, 10, or 12. I’ve purchased several sets over the years, and I’m a complete tool guy. I gotta have ‘em all.
Not having a great strat neck, to show the beginning steps, just use your imagination and do without the pics.
First, in order to remove the strat nut, cut any finish that might have crawled up onto the sides, or anywhere else. Using a set of standard pliers, place them in between the D and G string slots and pull upward with a steady, firm pull. Don’t yank, but you might have to do a little bit of wiggling to convince it to let loose.
After the nut is out, using a FRESH razor blade, remove any glue out of the slot, but be mindful not to remove any wood. Fender necks usually have a radiused underside to the nut, and if your neck does, using your radius gauges figure out what the underside radius is. To make it easier, the underside radius usually matches that of the fretboard. I said usually, I have ran into some that don’t, but I suspect they were probably refretted at some time or another by a previous owner.
For the sake of this article, we’re going to be using the common compromise, 9.5” radius. First start by finding the width of your neck. Or using the old nut as a guide, transfer the neck’s width onto your nut blank. After you’ve done that, it’s time to start cutting. I usually like to have the inside of the pencil mark to be the correct width, so I follow the outside of the mark with our hacksaw, or thin cut. NOTE I usually don’t use the nut and saddle vise, but this was done at the kitchen table, and was told that if I put one MORE scratch in it, I’m dead
You might want to save all the bone dust that is created from cutting. Remember the build up a slot with baking soda thing? You get it even better when you use bone dust. You also might want to save the little “unusable” pieces for just such an occasion.
Alright, after we’ve roughly cut it to size, we’re going to smooth out the edges a tad with our double cut mill file. There’s really no sense in rounding off the edges at the moment, cause we’ve still got a lot of work to be done. You want to clean them up just a tad, we’ll do the heavy polishing later.
Now, that we’ve got the nut cut out to proper length, let’s put some radius’ on it shall we? Using your radius gauge, trace out your bottom radius. Then the top. You want to leave it higher than what you’d like in the guitar, so you have some room for error, and proper string slots. After you’ve done that, you have two choices to remove material. With your double cut mill file, or hacksaw. I suggest for a novice, to use the mill file. It removes material slower than the hacksaw, so it’s harder to botch. For the sake of time, and the fact that I’ve done this before. It’s 10:30 at night, I don’t wanna be doing this until sunrise.
By now your nut should look something like that pictured below. Pay attention to how I left the bass side a tad higher than the treble. Just to give me a little more room to play around. Notice, it’s still in a rough shape, but we’ll take care of that here in a minute. Once you’ve got your nut rough cut, use 80 grit sandpaper to smooth away most imperfections. We’re not going to be doing any final shaping right now, that comes later. We still want plenty of material to work with.
Don’t worry if I have more files than you do. They usually come in sets of 8, 10, or 12. I’ve purchased several sets over the years, and I’m a complete tool guy. I gotta have ‘em all.
Not having a great strat neck, to show the beginning steps, just use your imagination and do without the pics.
First, in order to remove the strat nut, cut any finish that might have crawled up onto the sides, or anywhere else. Using a set of standard pliers, place them in between the D and G string slots and pull upward with a steady, firm pull. Don’t yank, but you might have to do a little bit of wiggling to convince it to let loose.
After the nut is out, using a FRESH razor blade, remove any glue out of the slot, but be mindful not to remove any wood. Fender necks usually have a radiused underside to the nut, and if your neck does, using your radius gauges figure out what the underside radius is. To make it easier, the underside radius usually matches that of the fretboard. I said usually, I have ran into some that don’t, but I suspect they were probably refretted at some time or another by a previous owner.
For the sake of this article, we’re going to be using the common compromise, 9.5” radius. First start by finding the width of your neck. Or using the old nut as a guide, transfer the neck’s width onto your nut blank. After you’ve done that, it’s time to start cutting. I usually like to have the inside of the pencil mark to be the correct width, so I follow the outside of the mark with our hacksaw, or thin cut. NOTE I usually don’t use the nut and saddle vise, but this was done at the kitchen table, and was told that if I put one MORE scratch in it, I’m dead
You might want to save all the bone dust that is created from cutting. Remember the build up a slot with baking soda thing? You get it even better when you use bone dust. You also might want to save the little “unusable” pieces for just such an occasion.
Alright, after we’ve roughly cut it to size, we’re going to smooth out the edges a tad with our double cut mill file. There’s really no sense in rounding off the edges at the moment, cause we’ve still got a lot of work to be done. You want to clean them up just a tad, we’ll do the heavy polishing later.
Now, that we’ve got the nut cut out to proper length, let’s put some radius’ on it shall we? Using your radius gauge, trace out your bottom radius. Then the top. You want to leave it higher than what you’d like in the guitar, so you have some room for error, and proper string slots. After you’ve done that, you have two choices to remove material. With your double cut mill file, or hacksaw. I suggest for a novice, to use the mill file. It removes material slower than the hacksaw, so it’s harder to botch. For the sake of time, and the fact that I’ve done this before. It’s 10:30 at night, I don’t wanna be doing this until sunrise.
By now your nut should look something like that pictured below. Pay attention to how I left the bass side a tad higher than the treble. Just to give me a little more room to play around. Notice, it’s still in a rough shape, but we’ll take care of that here in a minute. Once you’ve got your nut rough cut, use 80 grit sandpaper to smooth away most imperfections. We’re not going to be doing any final shaping right now, that comes later. We still want plenty of material to work with.
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