Worked all night again and just got home. We are so busy these days many have to wait 6 months or more to get in with us unless they are a gigging musician we prioritize them and for our famous clients we close down and lock the doors and give them personal attention.
Worked on a Floyd equipped shredder and wanted to show folks something super useful to us and invented by David Collins my business partner.
It measures the depth of nut slots in respect to frets one and two.
As you know I've been talking here till I'm blue in the face (better than the alternative) about nuts slots, cutting them lower then you think you can and why, intonation improvement that in our considerable experience on a steel string eliminates any need for nut compensation. By the way Collins is Feiten trained, used to teach nut compensation and found a better way AGAIN... for steel string acoustic instruments that someone actually plays and they are not wall hangers or historic relics or classical instruments with nylon strings and a tradition of higher action than steel strings.
So in the pic with the Martin OOO-28 we see the tool and I've just cut this slot to where I like it in respect to frets one and two. I've brought this up before and amazed some folks but a well cut nut slot for a treble string may be lower than the first fret AND any zero fret would be if it had a zero fret. You can see I am a thou lower here and for this .011 string, Custom lights for an older guy with arthritis this guitar will play like butter. He has a gig tonight so does the other guitar player with the Ibanez.
If I placed the tool on a surface plate and pressed down it would read zero FYI.
Moving on the Floyd Ibanez shredder likes very low nut slots too and that's what shredding is speed playing and low action and alternate tunings such as the low E tuned to C are common and this guitar will have to do those things perfectly.
Chris Pyle knows and shredders have been a big part of his work too. You might like this tool Chris it makes Floyd nuts way easier to lower.
On a Floyd nut we don't individually cut the slots because it's a prefab steel nut assembly. It's possible to cut the slots individually but a pain in and ass and a time suck. We have done it for an A-lister but he gets special treatment.
I remove the nut and install two of the screws as handles for the belt sander as I mill the bottom of the nut down, measure and mill, measure and mill. The cup of water is to drop it into because it gets too hot to hold. You can see in the pics that it started out .018" higher than fret one and that's terrible. This thing would not play in tune there was so very much string stretch from fretting notes.
Also a note on why we mill the nut down and not the wood in the nut channel. We do not want to weaken the neck at the headstock joint by digging the nut channel deeper. In this real life example that would have been .018" of material removal from the neck and that would weaken it. Other Luthiers may mill the neck instead but we don't like this.
The pics tell the story of the bottom of the nut assembly coming down on the belt sander and you can see my results in the end. I am below the height of the first fret, again and this guitar will play super easy now. When I fret between the second and third and hold and pulse the string over the 1st it still "tinks" indicating it's not laying or in contact with the fret.
As I've offered here many times strings arc out of these slots, off saddles etc. and that's how it's possible to have a slot lower than the next fret and this is a perfect illustration of just that.
How low do we cut them. It's difficult to measure but for a high e .010 we think we are below .0005" when fretting between the 2nd and 3rd. Dave goes lower than I do he is a young guy at 46 and can still see...
Each progressively more massive string gets cut higher.Again the value of this is improved intonation on fretted notes for frets 1 - 6ish. Less string stretch, etc. AND MUCH easier to play.
It's also one of the few things you can do for your clients that they will notice at once when they play especially barring the first fret. They look up at us while trying it and smile and we love it.
And a pic of my bench in Ann Arbor at 3:00 AM this morning.
Thanks Don, I love gumbo, dang it. 