Cutting a nut slot

[gdgross]

So I want necessarily looking to build another guitar, but a friend pointed me to these unfinished necks on GFS, and for $20 and a shot at building a fretless guitar, I just couldn't say no.

http://www.guitarfetish.com/Luthiers-Special-Unfinished-In-Progress-Stratocaster-Neck-_p_8354.html#

They come without the nut slot, though, so I'll have to do cut my own. Any advice on doing this?  I'm more concerned with getting the slot tight and at the right height, rather than exact placement, as this will be a fretless neck, without fret slots or lines to tell me I'm too close or far from the bridge.

Thanks!
Geoff

 

[Cagey]

Back when I was installing LSR nuts, I had a jig I built to manage a router for cutting the slot. But, before you build a jig, you'd probably want to know you're going to use it more than once because making the jig is a lot tougher than the actual cut you're going to make. I've never seen such a thing for sale, so you have to design/build your own.

If you don't feel like going through all that rigmarole, there's a build log here that shows how one guy did it with simpler tools. He's doing it on a banjo neck, but the process would be the same.

 

[gdgross]

Cool, thanks for that link - I don't imagine I'll be doing this more than this one time.  I'll always prefer to have someone else who cuts more precisely than me do this kind of work.

I was thinking maybe it's as simple as getting the right sized router bit on my dremel tool and going slow?  The fret saw he mentioned in the link is not a bad idea; I like that it cuts slower than a router, but I'm a little worries about how to make the bottom nice and flat, although I suppose his file method is a decent way to do it too....

Anyway, thanks!
Geoff

 

[Cagey]

Well, usually that slot is cut before the neck is fully assembled, and you have more options at that time. But, you're past that.

The router is the way to do it on an assembled neck (unless you have a CNC), but it needs a jig.

StewMac sells nut seating files...

... for flattening the bottom, but they're kinda pricey. They work well, though.

 

[SkuttleFunk]

jig well, my friend ... jig well

 

[gdgross]

Lol I intend to!  Can't screw up this step... :-D

Is there any general preference for flat bottomed vs curves bottomed nuts?  I'm leaning towards using the flat bottomed nut, so I can cut the slot using slower tools like a fine toothed saw and file, rather than faster tools like my dremel, which leave me more potential to screw something up.

For fender necks, as far as I can tell, stewmac only carries a 7.25" radius but with a flat bottom. That's fine with me, skinny radius will be ok as this'll be a fretless guitar with not much string bending going on

Unfortunately I just discovered that the fingerboard is flat, so I'll have to do some radiusing, too. No option I see except those wooden neck radius sanding blocks from stewmac.  I might not be able to keep this build under my $100 goal ;-)

 

[Cagey]

Curved bottom nuts are sort of an anomaly. Flat is the way to go.

 

[gdgross]

Perfect!  Will use my slow tools then

 

[john_p_wi]

Before you get too far, may I suggest that you verify that the neck actually fits the pocket of the intended body and a measured expected point of intonation from the bridge to proposed nut location can be achieved?  The only reason that I bring this up, is that the one thing that I have learned with 30+ years of messing around with guitars is that "cheap" never ends up "cheap" nor with the results initially expected.

 

[Cagey]

Good advice.

 

[gdgross]

Will do, although I'm less concerned with perfect intonation, as this'll be a fretless guitar.  I got the body for $40 from the same place, should be here later this week.

 

[stubhead]

This may sound a little odd, but having played fretless bass for a quarter-century or so, vast buckets of slide & steel guitar, and now a good fretless guitar for... going on 6 months -





as well as any number of fretless guitars "made" the conventional way:

It's actually a really good idea to get the intonation as close as you possibly can, for the simple reason that you need ALL the help you can get, that-a-ways! And no matter how hard you practice and what kind of exercises you invent for yourself to play all of the notes in any given lick in tune - the first time you take it out and start trying to play with others will be a really, ummmmmm... stunning experience. For the both of youse....

Pitch control is a fascinating subject, if you dig into it a bit you find that tone and attack and emphasis are a lot more pitch-related than a casual listen would bear. The sharper you play, the brighter it will sound, up and until it's just... out-of-tune. Pianos are always tuned with the higher and lower note ranges adjusted off of dead-center A=440. I now wish I had made a good one when I was 26 or 16, not 56.... But: If you roll into it with the comical, lackadaisical attitude -

It's just a fretless guitar! How could intonation matter? HAR Har...

...Har, har, ha ha.... it's always going to sound exactly like that. If you want to mock yourself loudest and firstest with the mostest in order to defuse & dissuade other's mockery it'll work OK, but then, why play it at all, really? Just to annoy people...(?!?) For me personally, the "joy of music" is surely not increased by immediately discarding the notion of getting better at some aspect of it until I'm actually getting good at it. But as they say:

There's more than one way to skin a cat!

and as I say (vis-a-vis fretless guitars):

There's more than one way to sound like skinning a cat too! :icon_thumright:

Those sales look pretty awful, huh. $70 for a body AND neck to build... a backup to my backup's backup? If I could just find an Eskimo squaw to chew my food for me, I could stop throwing all my money at the dentist this year, hmmm. Or is it only birds and lizards that do that for their babies anymore? How much do lizards cost? cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep

If I had to make a prediction as to where "pop music is going", I theeenk that after the wholesale slaughter of melody by rhythmic whomping the last two decades or so, I would wild-ass-guess that melody will be returning, but not bright, screamy shreddy guitar - if you can't whistle or hum it, you are not going to fit too many radio programmer's ideas of hits. And the J-pop and eighties synth-pop melodies - almost nursery rhyme-sounding boink-boink-boink four-note do-re-mi stuff - nah. I would expect far snakier, more slithery, slidish/fretless kind of pseudo-foreign "Eastern" kind of stuff. Pop music is only as awful as people make it....

 

[gdgross]

Good points! I'm planning on getting this as accurate as possible based on the scale of my other strats. I believe the neck has no dots on the side of the neck, so I think I'm going to want to add those too...

 

[SkuttleFunk]

since this is a fretless ... when you add those side dots, put them at the 'fret line' locations and not between two fret lines like would be the case if frets were installed.

this way you'll know where the 3/5/7/9/12/15/17/19/21 fret lines are and more easily be able to approximate the in between locations while you're training your ear and hand

 

[gdgross]

That's kinda what I was thinking since there's no fret lines in this neck... I'll need l the help I can get

 

[swarfrat]

The violinist's I've talked were all the same. This ain't no mass produced hack instrument where the player has limited control over his intonation. They're far pickier about tuning than any guitar players I've met, even though in theory they can fix their intonation problems in real time. They have all these issues PLUS an itty bitty scale length.

The only thing worse I could think of is playing music on the reed of a deer call. I do it with my son, he thinks its a hoot. I can't really show off this skill though to people who don't think daddy is the awesome at person in the whole wide world, ever! Its's got about two octaves in and inch or so of reed. You can move it a fourth just by rolling finger pressure without even changing the contact finger print.

 

[stubhead]

I discovered a super-easy way to make side dots (and I guess facial too!) It's called "Milliput. You drill your holes (I can mentally get within 1/64" accuracy. I think....) Then you mix up a little gob of it, squashing two claylike things together, they say for five minutes.

http://www.milliput.com/

Then you squish little gobs in the holes:





And, Viola! Or Vlwah-ha!* Side dots... it does shrink a tiny bit, I would've made them a little bulgey if I'd known, but it would be too weird to try to add a bulge to the existing ones.


(or whatever the current correct speelng iz...)