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Not as dire as it sounds. I was trying to fit a nut on my present build and I find that the nut slot is wider than nominal. It's close to 7mm (more like 6.9mm), and the widest nut blank in my pile is around 6.4mm. If anyone has a wider one that they'd trade or sell, please shoot me a PM. This is for a classical - need 52mm long.

I guess I could shim the slot but I'm afraid it will look less than perfect.\

Thanks,

Jim

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Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu

You could stop into your nearest pet store and find a chunk of bone that would fit the bill.

I believe I have one for ya Jim...PM me your address and I'll mail it Monday...

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http://www.presnallguitars.com

That's great! Thanks. PM on the way.

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Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu

Sorry I missed your post, Jim. If you don't find what you need, I have plenty, both bleached and unbleached.

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

At the risk of falling for a joke, where do you get bone for nuts from yukonarizona? The pet store? I have been looking for a less expensive alternative to supply house bone saddles and nuts, and I have come up short. If you have something that you buy and cut up in the pet store please let me know. I want to get away from plastic, though I have a nice medium/hard density plastic I use right now with great results. I was thinking if asking a butcher for a thigh bone but it just seems like so much work, and I would have to dry the bone first and possibly treat it somehow to make it sterile. That being said, I don't mind a little work not to have to pay stew-mac $15 a set. Thanks.

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http://www.sixgunguitars.com

Buy blanks and shape them yourself, and the price drops significantly. Buy them by the dozen and it drops even more, and there is another price break at two dozen. There's a lot of time in cutting up bone to get blanks. What's your time worth? Even at the worst price a set of blanks is about $8.00, and if you order with other supplies, shipping becomes negligible.

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Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

At my local pet store they have a bin full of cow bones that look pretty clean and are individually wrapped in thick shrink wrap. $5 each.

Here's one that I bought about a year and a half ago.



after I cut it up, I soaked the pieces in camp stove gas, then acetone, then hydrogen peroxide. I left it in the stuff for days at a time, and very little happened. I assumed the bones had already been treated with something, which is probably scary from a pet-perspective, but a bonus for me! I've long lost the brand name. but I've used the stuff for both saddles and nuts, now, and had great results.

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"...you have to get over your strict adherence to your largely imagined notion of absolute perfection..."

I will have to check that out. Im not running at a capacity that I can buy a dozen or more nuts/saddles at a time so the initial output is a but scary there even at $8 a set, thats still $96-$192 just to get going. I am however on place for making about 16 guitars this year, so perhaps that's not as bad of a deal as I thought. Either way, I'm going to check out both routes. Even if I can get the nuts from the pet store at (from the picture) what looks like $5 for 20-30 blanks, that's a huge savings and worth my time. Thanks for the reply, I really appreciate it.

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http://www.sixgunguitars.com

With my cow bone the color wasn't always uniform, and there were marks in them that kinda looked like cracks, but seemed stable, so I used em anyway, since they are staying close to home....







might be a large investment of your time to make them. but try it and see. good luck.

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"...you have to get over your strict adherence to your largely imagined notion of absolute perfection..."

I can't get into the notion of cutting my own bone blanks - too much mess and stink, don't really have the right saw to do it with, etc.
I do have a good sized batch of blanks that I bought all at once, as Waddy suggested, but ... the 6.4mm was the widest of the batch.

I have one on the way that hopefully will work. If it's too narrow, it will be by only 0.1mm or so, then I'll stick a paper or plastic shim in there or something.

And I just noticed that LMI does carry very wide blanks - 7.94mm. I hadn't noticed that item before.

Here's the first pore filling on the guitar this is going on. Z-Poxy over East Indian Rosewood, with Coco bindings. My purfling miters still stink, particularly on this one where I have miters at both the tail and heel - I couldn't figure out how to get the purfling strips cut to just exactly the right length.

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Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu

Do you have a hacksaw and a couple of clamps? I cut that piece I posted the pic of, last summer. sat out on the patio and had it clamped to a concrete/brick thing near my porch. went to town on it with a hacksaw. in about a half hour i had a handful of blanks. then trued them up on the belt sander out in the garage. in the time we have spent typing in this thread i coulda had five more.

there's really no mess, just bone dust, and I always do this outside. so no issue there. but the stink is really something. like burning hair. i just don't do it in the house.

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"...you have to get over your strict adherence to your largely imagined notion of absolute perfection..."

Thank you Martin!
I've been saving bones for a while now.
Whenever I see one on da floor I think "I could get 8 nuts out of that"!
My problem is most nut blanks are max 15/32" tall,
which is just about 1/16" shy of what I want.
Tomorrow I try slicing up bones!
No worse than the smell when the dentist is "grinding" away.

Thankful I have great teeth!

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Jim Kirby
kirby@udel.edu