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| The Job - The owner of this Ibanez® 7 string guitar brought it in to replace the plastic nut for a quality bone nut. We custom cut and shaped a blank nut by hand. |
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The stock plastic nut slots are badly cut, and often the root of many tuning issues and sustain problems.
A hollowed out molded plastic nut is hardly the ideal material for string energy conduction. |
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| Immaculately slicing the edges of the gluejoints to prevent lifting or cracking the laquer during removal. |
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| The plastic nut is carefully tapped out with a hammer. |
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| The nut is now dislodged and we can start work on the neck. |
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| The nut slot was then filed with a nut seating file to ensure a good flat surface for gluing the nut later on. |
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| Filing completed. |
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| Taking the measurements of the nut width. |
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| Measurement for the stock nut height was also taken. |
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| The fretboard radius was also taken into account. |
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| Now to overlay the measurements onto the bone nut blank. |
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| Bone is a highly popular choice of material for making nuts and saddles due to its hardness and density. |
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| Shaping the contours of the nut by hand. |
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The filing had to be done slowly and carefully, that's the key to shaping any nut.
You don't want to take out more material than you're supposed to, or you'll have to start all over. |
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| After the initial filing, the nut now looks nicely radiused. |
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| Here, we add the break-angle at the edge of the nut. |
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| The nut is beginning to take shape very nicely. but the job is far from completion. A lot of filing and shaping awaits! |
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| Now to measure the width of the stock nut before sanding the bone nut down to the correct width, so that it will fit the old nut slot. |
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| Sanding down the nut width. |
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| The nut has been sanded down to the ideal width. |
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| The string slots are then drafted using a pencil and will be lightly slotted before the gluing can begin. |
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| It's a good idea to use normal string tension as a clamp for slotting. |
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| This photo shows a comparison of a nut blank and nut we shaped by hand. Pretty neat aye? |
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| After gluing, the nut slots are then properly slotted to accomodate indivdual string gauges. |
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| The nut slots are then properly slotted their respective string heights as well. |
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| All the nut slots are now slotted! |
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| Guitar grease from StewMac® was applied onto the nut before stringing up the guitar. Job completed! |
