We believe that your guitar’s nut is the most important lynch pin of a good setup. If it’s not cut properly, there’s no other adjustment you can make that will improve the feel of your instrument. The nut is also the most crucial aspect of keeping your guitar in tune. We’ve seen so many people spend hundreds of dollars on fancy new tuners only to find that their guitar still won’t stay in tune, when simply cutting the nut properly would have solved the problem. Many people buy aftermarket, pre-made bone nuts to drop into their guitars, but they’re never exactly right. Every guitar is slightly different, due to hand sanding, fret size, and wear – so we make all our bone nuts from scratch to fit your particular guitar. Here’s our process in making a bone nut.
Recently we received a MusicMan Stingray 5 with a broken nut, which was limping through gigs with a napkin stuck under the B string.
MusicMan and many others make their nuts out of a type of plastic, typically corian, which is perfectly fine if you’re into that type of thing. We make our nuts out of bone, and sometimes brass, and some golden-ears types swear they can hear an improvement in tone over the plastic. Personally, we don’t hear much of a difference, but ears and brains are weird things, so if you say you hear it we absolutely believe you. The main reason we use bone is that it’s more environmentally friendly than plastic, it’s easy to carve, and it looks great. (Improved tone is just an added bonus.)
We start making a bone nut with a bone blank, typically cow bone – but occasionally we get in a special batch of dragon and unicorn bones (supplies extremely limited). This comes to us in a rough cut blank, like so:
Every guitar is slightly different, and we painstakingly shape the bone to an exact fit for your guitar. We start with the larger cuts on our giant belt sander, finesse it in with sandpaper glued to a flat hard surface, and then polish the sides before gluing it in. This is one of the more time consuming steps – the transition from the bone to the wood must be absolutely seamless.
Now here’s where we get fancy. For years we used complicated calculations and rulers to map out the nut slot’s spacing. Nowadays we use our PLEK machine for this critical step. We program the PLEK for action, string gauge, spacing, and several other factors for each individual guitar, and set it to work. This is far more accurate and repeatable than can be accomplished by hand, and we feel this is the superior way to go. Plus, it’s super fun watching it go:
For most jobs, we program the PLEK for a hybrid string spacing, which splits the difference between center-to-center and edge-to-edge. Typically we’re aiming for the outer string’s edges to be 3mm in from the edge of the fretboard, and a slot depth of around .07mm-0.1mm above the first fret.
Once the PLEK process is finished, it’s time to do all the artsy shaping by hand. Since we’ve already fit the nut into the neck, and the PLEK cut slots are perfectly cut for width, depth, and spacing, we do all the final shaping while it’s still in the neck. We do most of the rough shaping with a file, and then finalize the shape with a series of sandpapers and polish it out with micro-mesh. This requires some skill and delicacy – if one isn’t careful they could put a serious scratch in the neck. We tape off the nut and carefully shape and polish the nut into our preferred form.
There you have it! We make bone nuts from scratch like this almost every day, bespoke to each individual instrument. If you’d like a customized bone nut made for your guitar, come and see us!
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