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Tim has a very important point. Every setup I do is all about making the neck play the way the client wants it to.


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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

I think the truer issue is that I’m making my own nuts from blanks for the first time as of fairly recently and find it to be its own unique challenge, so tinkering with that process to make it more ideal than the manufacturer specs is probably something I’ll have to think about once I make my first few that are less than slightly embarrassing

Doing freehand work on something pretty unforgiving just takes practice so it’ll obviously take me some time and it’s good to hear the nuances. I appreciate all the pro advice and my way of phrasing things is intended to solicit thoughtful feedback. I think the pros often neglect important small details because they forget that they didn’t know them at one point.

We all sucked when we started. Keep at it.

Once in a great while I run across a nut I made 40 years on a guitar. First I cringe at how awful it looks, then I realize it lasted this long, so I did something right. If the current owner will let me, I'll replace it with new for free.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

There are many skills in Lutherie that don't get the attention of this forum typically. The emphasis here is woodworking with some of us having to suggest over and over and over and over through the years that guitars are much more than a woodworking project they are tools for musicians.....

The builders who survive building beyond selling to friends and family have learned that ultimately a guitar also has to play........ great as well as look good and sound good.

So when one embraces the "tool for a musician" view of Lutherie crafting nuts, superb fret work, set-ups that play and sound great and all that leads to this in the "chassis" of the instrument become the focus.

You've noticed on your own that making what may appear to be a simple nut is not so simple. Some things that helped me progress with nut making are:

1). Make a small anvil (16 lbs is what mine is and covered in leather). They are great for steadying the work piece such as a nut to saddle when hand filing, sanding, etc.

2). Put together a collection of favorite files and tools and make a kit just for this. I have a half round OOO file that I love for this kind of bone work. A collection of gauged nut files is a must too.

3). If you have not gotten into polishing your nuts and saddles yet that's on the list too and you can use micro mesh or make a nut buffer like we did. Pics are here on the OLF of our nut buffer if you search for "nut buffer."

Anyway good on you for wanting to make your own and I always liken making a nut to the guys on sailing ships hundreds of years ago doing scrimshaw. It can be fun and relaxing and rewarding too when your nut eloquently blends into the whole of the instrument and provided great value by making the guitar very easy to play.

I won’t say mine is great but it’s certainly not terrible. It’s at least comparable to what came on my Gibson, if not a bit better of a fit. I’m currently making another for my Dunable guitar, which had a Tusq nut that wasn’t particularly well fitted but was ok.

The issue I saw on my Les Paul nut was that, when I popped it into place and used a small drop of elmers glue, I think (but don’t know for sure) that it may not have been fully seated. When I was stringing it up it sounded like it settled in a bit further and made a noise when it did so. Several of the strings had a bit of slack on them after that. So next time I string it I’ll see if the nut is loose and re-seat it and check the slot depth again.

I don’t buff the nut but I have 1500 and 3000 wet dry paper to make it pretty shiny. I’ll look at the nut buffer because I want the bottom of the slots to be smooth as you suggest.

We've got several guitars in our shop waiting on new nuts right now that's how many we do of these and around 1,100 guitars annually come through our shop with the most minor work we will take in is one of our coveted set-ups that people stand in line to get now. I do about 3 - 4 of those a day. We charge about $100 for our set-ups which are more than set-ups and that includes new stings. Of course this is not for fret work or more major repairs but we always through in stuff that simply needs to be done because that's how we roll, perfectionists who are wrapped too tight.

When a client brings us a commercially made nut such as tusq to install we turn them away. The only new nuts that we will provide are hand made, individually crafted for each, specific instrument.

Why? Because good nut making is an exercise in very close tolerances for a gapless fit and ultimate performance. All of ours are made from our materials unless someone wants to bring us something that is not ivory that is suitable too and we approve it's use. Commercial nuts never fit well, are often poorly made and require just as much work to fit well as crafting a new nut from quality bone and from scratch.

There is a tutorial I did many years ago here that I'll post if I can find it.

Found it! The basics of what I do these days are here. https://www.luthiersforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10117&t=46829

The best part of your tutorial is the excellent photographs.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Couldn't find it. Got a link?

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Pat

I can't find a pic of it here either after searching "nut buffer" there are lots of references to it but no pics. I'll take a pic today and post it Pat. I hope you are doing great too man.

I use digital caliper jaws as a fence, and a double square for spacing the two outside strings. Works great. Been making nuts for many years but only the past couple years I changed things up and am much happier (and much faster!) with my results. I made this video for cutting 12 string nuts, but this section applies to any nut:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjuC2NpXB9U&t=321s

That's a much older guitar and if I were to do that over again now, I wouldn't leave those slots so deep. But the method still stands: using the jaws as a fence, it's almost impossible to mess up. I don't think I mentioned it in that video but nowadays I double check with the calipers by spreading them between the strings, and move the string over either way (left or right) by angling the file, if necessary. This is only to correct for thousandths.

Did a 12 string bass earlier with this method (pictured first in the video), and it worked perfectly. I use this method 100% of the time now for all nuts I make and it really speeds things along significantly.

I watched your video Dan and it looks like your method works great for you but I'll stick with my method. I also think advising people to throw away the Stew Mac string spacing ruler is not a good idea. That tool is great for lots of other things such as spacing on Mando bridges as well as spacing on Gibson saddles on electrics that are not notched and not in the center of each saddle either.

You've made some calculations as well and done some math to get the specs that you are using for spacing. For many folks these calculations and remembering them would be more time consuming then using the SM rule.

I suspect that you also cut the nut slots much deeper if the strings are not even half submerged in the slot lots of my clients would rip a string right out of a slot this shallow.

My business partner and I think that Dan E. is who came up with the 1/2 sting submerged idea and we are also friends with Dan he's been to our shop a number of times and he started his career in the store that was in our building. We don't subscribe to the 1/2 string proud thing for the same reason an active player with first and second fret bends will rip that string right out of the nut slot.

So I am happy that what you do works for you but I'm keeping my SM spacing ruler it works just fine for me and an acoustic guitar nut was not the only usage that this tool was developed for.

Do you have a shop, do you do repair work professionally and commercially?

Welcome to the forum.

The throwing away the SM ruler was just a joke pertaining to the difficulty of using the SM ruler for paired string nuts specifically -- I hope people don't take it too seriously! I think techs in general are well aware of the SM ruler and I don't think anyone would stop using it anytime soon. It isn't my preference, but I do own one and have used it in the past and it has a comfortable place in my Nut tools drawer, not in the garbage.

I do appreciate the feedback though and I think I'll edit the video description to clarify that it was a joke, and I would never dog other people's tools or methods seriously. That's actually a big point of mine as I think that people *seriously* dogging others and talking down other methods is a very ugly thing. I'm a big believer in there being no "best way" in all cases, and would never seriously dog someone else's method if it lands them at the desired destination.

I've come to prefer the math + caliper method, for slotting bridge saddles as well as nuts, but the SM ruler is an excellent tool and the R&D that went into developing it is extremely impressive. It works for many people -- it is the "gold standard" these days for string spacing and almost every tech I know relies on them every day. I don't know why I didn't connect with that tool but I never was able to get used to it, just my preference.

I am an avid player and always thoroughly test my guitars after doing any work on them, and can't stand it if something isn't working right. I used to bury the strings in the nut slots before I was aware of keeping them more shallow. At least on that 12 string I've had no issues with 2nd fret bends popping the strings out of the slot, surprisingly enough. But it absolutely is something to be aware of, and is not acceptable if that happens.

Going more shallow is only something I've recently started experimenting with, and while I completely agree popping strings out of the slot is not acceptable, I've been surprised at how shallow I can get the slots without having that issue, even with aggressive 2nd fret bends. But that is the litmus test for sure. I would never let any of my own or anyone else's guitar have that issue. It's certainly easy to overdo it.

As for me, I'll mention my mentor first: I'm a semi pro that has done a lot of work for a real pro. I work from my home like he does. Back in the day I helped him a lot with store repairs that he'd pick up and drop off from the local music shop, and to this day will take on anything he has for me to work on, in addition to whatever comes to me independently.

He's in his 70's and started his career in 1969 working for Dan Armstrong. Has worked at multiple shops over the years, as well as for some independent luthiers, owned his own store for some years before deciding it was too much of a headache to run, and for a long time now has been working from his own home as I mentioned earlier. He specializes in vintage guitar repair, restoration, as well as appraisals, listings, packing and shipping, though I've seen just about every guitar imaginable come into his house.

As for me specifically: been playing for over 18 years, and doing guitar work for about 15 years. I've focused mostly on setups, nuts, saddles, refretting, building and winding pickups and pickup rewinds, pickguard copies and custom pickguards, wiring, and basic mod stuff like tuner installations, routing bodies/pickguards for new parts, bridge installations, etc., though I've done a fair amount of repair and refinishing work, which I am not a fan of anymore and have shifted away from.

My friend has done just about everything imaginable over the last 50+ years, and he's thrown me plenty of work over the years, in addition to work that comes to me independently, but I've chosen to focus on more playability based operations, as my main inspiration for tech work came out of me being an avid guitarist in multiple styles of music.

Doing extensive pickguard and pickup work has also been a product of wanting to improve my own guitars -- I definitely count pickguard design and layout as a huge part of the playability factor, and to my ear, tone absolutely affects how I play, and being able to make my own pickups just the way I want has been addictive, to say the least! It's also turned into an obsession where I throw every pickup that comes in onto my LCR meter and USB oscilloscope for a full writeup. And a lot of fun to have rewound a lot of vintage Fender pickups for my friend, whenever they come up.

I'd never claim to be a luthier, just a guitar tech with a couple specializations. And my main motivation has been setting up my own guitars to meet my demands, which are very particular. Even the slightest thing not working perfectly on any one of my guitars drives me absolutely nuts. I'll take whatever comes in whenever it comes in to work on, but regardless of that, scarcely a day has gone by where I'm not working on one of my own guitar related projects.

My own playing and how the guitar feels to me is always my litmus test, and so far I'm the most demanding guitar player I know. I pride myself on being overly critical of my own work and no matter how happy I am with one of my guitars, I'm always thinking there's something I can tweak to make it better. Notice I didn't say the best guitar player I know...there is a difference

But for sure, doing a lot of work for other people has taught me a lot. Back in my early days I saw many "I set it up myself" guitars that I ended up fixing. I do know at least one self-taught guitar tech and luthier with his own line of guitars in NYC that is, by all accounts, very, very good -- but for me personally, if I didn't have my mentor, I would have been lost. Lots of coaching in my early days as a teen learning how to work on guitars, and he was pretty blunt about criticizing my work. If it didn't look good he'd simply tell me and have me do it over again. Lots of nuts like that...and man was that brutal.

He also never used a SM ruler and always cuts his nuts by eye, which is how I learned to do it.

And his nuts do look spaced perfectly. It took me a long time to realize this is only something some people can do, and it isn't a matter of pride, just preference. I learned a lot of old school methods such as using Nicholson files to level frets, something you can do proficiently if you're experienced enough, but I had to strike out largely on my own and realize I needed more traditional, foolproof methods to do many things. Most of the methods I learned were methods he'd been using for decades, long before any of the modern tools existed.

After a long time of struggling I figured out independently how to make and use templates and again, use more foolproof methods for many things, as well as using measurements. There are a lot of old school guys going "by feel" with everything that get very good results, but it's a product of decades of experience, and doesn't translate well to teaching beginners. I'm much happier these days using digital gauges and having specific numbers to reference for setup specifications.

Anyway! I'm a talker, if you couldn't tell So sorry for the long intro. But glad to be hear with like-minded people. I don't really ever get a chance to talk guitars with anyone but my friend. I know a lot of techs online via Instagram, which turns out to be a great place to meet other like-minded techs and luthiers -- but many are too busy to chat. Wasn't until some years ago when I made an Instagram account and saw guitar techs and luthiers from all over the world that my mind was blown. So much more out there!

Where to start is easy here, thanks Matt for a very thoughtful reply to my inquiries, very much appreciated man! And again welcome to the OLF. Going to address some of your points below.

Thanks for taking my remarks as intended to be helpful. I have a wicked sense of humor too and we would get along very well. . We made a video as a joke and put it on Youtube but Dave took it back down of bridge removal. We don't tell anyone that 2/3rds of the way though the video Dave pulls out a hatchet and hit the guitar full force and HITs the bridge the first time knocking it completely off, dry and cold. It was intended to be a joke too.

I want to do a second joke video with a golf driver (my handicap was 4 when I had to quit because of a bad hernia...) and using the golf club to knock a cold bridge off

Nut slot depth - Yes any less shallow then 1/2 the string submerged can be a problem for some players and I am one of them. I am an aggressive player at times (Stones covers....) and can pull a string out. In my world, I just worked all night and repaired 7 guitars, I may not get to meet the player and as such have to do generic set-ups that would work for 99% of folks. So shallow nut slots would be resulting in returns for us. We service over 1,100 guitars annually so we can't have returns. Our minimum is a full set-up.

Since you spoke of your friend and the stores he's worked for we are not a store. We are a dedicated Lutherie shop in the epicenter of Ann Arbor with famous clients and a huge waiting list for anything other than our minimum service which is a set-up. My business partner is a life long Luthier who taught Lutherie at the Galloup School and then worked at Elderly Instruments in Lansing. He's been offered management roles at other famous shops and turns them down wanting like me to be self employed in our own shop. I'm a retired GE executive who has been doing this for 17 years with baptism by fire co-owning a very busy shop. I have to work nights and weekends now we are so busy and I just got done working all night... again.

Dave Collins is an authority of fret work and even Dan E asks him for advice at times Dave is so very knowledgable. I read what you wrote about fret work and you have a VERY good understanding of it and would appreciate seeing how we fret dress, refret, treat the fret plane as a whole and never individual frets in isolation.

Doing things by hand including precise measurements is amazing and the human eye can be as accurate as anything if we leave them open The SM ruler is a problem solver but you still have to use your eyes for the final location as I do and like you said we manipulate our nut files a tad this way or that way until it's pleasing to the eye, too.

Matt I wanted to extend an invitation to you if you are ever in Michigan to visit our shop and meet Dave and I. We live and breath guitars too and we are both players as well and we both drink and I get high too I think that you would get a kick out of our place. You also remind me of Dave, a very bright guy with a lot of excitement for Lutherie.

Thanks for letting me know if you are commercial or not too, did not mean to sound like a dick although at my advanced age now I often do and don't seem to always know it.....

Sure thing!

You'd get along famously with my friend and mentor, I'm certain -- and me as well of course! At his last gig he racked up over 15,000 repairs with a total of zero complaints, and that was only in about a 10 year period out of the 50+ years he's been in the biz, and is always saying the same thing: when you're running it as a business, you can't have repairs coming back. Just about everything revolves around that, and of course the customer "wow" factor.

He also deals with very high end clients but in that department it's -mostly- the electric guitar range, which is his specialty. I've played at least two original '59 Les Paul Standards over there, and recently went to a client's house to see him black light a wide variety of rare old guitars, like a few '68 blonde 335's and near mint early '60s Strats. What's funny is while it sounds impressive, my only reason to mention stuff like that to people is to lend credibility to my friend, as many people have trusted him for years to work on such old guitars.

It sounds impressive but I remember playing the '59 Les Paul for about 15 minutes and being like "Yeah this is incredible!" when in my mind I was just thinking "My guitar feels a lot better though and I'd rather be playing that right now"

He's really huge into guitar history, and his knowledge about guitars and guitar history really is encyclopedic. I've never been able to mention anything about any make or model of any guitar he hasn't been familiar with, while I'm pretty much the opposite where I know almost nothing about guitar and guitar manufacturer history, or any of that stuff, and have just laser focused on playability and the technical aspects of getting guitars to perform their best. Pretty much to the exclusion of everything else.

Dave Collins sounds like he really knows what he's doing, and fretwork is something I've been obsessed about for a very long time. Does he have any archived posts or articles or anything published online I could check out? Always eager to learn more. Fretwork really is the heart of all guitar work and the foundation for playability, just funny that it gets so intricate you could spend a lifetime cracking the codes on all of it. And the lower action you want, the more insanely obsessive you have to be with how you're doing it. I'm happy with my fretwork but not 100% and am always striving to learn more. Big believe in the 'always a student' mindset.

Also, as far as work experience: my friend's time in the trenches has rubbed off on me, and he's always very adamant about guitars not coming back. That, and his saying, One 'oh poop' erases a thousand 'attaboys.' And that is the truth! He also made it very clear to me early on that if I ever did make a mistake I'd better be sure I know how to fix it. For the most part I've stuck to that but I've made even more strides by simply turning away work I'm not 100% confident in doing.

And I'm not doing this full time, so I've had to set realistic expectations. Acknowledge my strengths but not be ashamed to admit a lack of skill or experience in some areas, such as repairs. I can get things to work, but getting them to work *and* look perfect is an art form and lately I've simply been telling people that. Functional repairs, I've got them covered, but for the disappearing act stuff to make it look like it never happened, that's not my bag. On some things I can but even then I've had to learn for me personally, it isn't worth my time as it's not my strong suit by any stretch.

One time about fifteen years ago, he had just finished lecturing me about not making mistakes on customer's guitars, ever. I nodded in agreement as I was crowning the frets on a Les Paul Custom, and as I looked over at him to agree, I slipped with the file and gaffed the back of the neck pretty badly. It was almost as bad as that time I was upstairs playing with the dog and then I accidentally knocked a guitar over, and it domino effect knocked over about 30 other guitars he had next to it.

The worst part was having to build up the gall to tell him what I'd just done, right after he reiterated the importance of not making mistakes. The only other mistake that immediately comes to mind is probably the first year I took any work from him. $50 plywood student guitar for a school. I decided to reglue the bridge with epoxy but wasn't aware of needing fitted cauls for the braces at the time. So halfway through the night, one of the soundhole clamps slipped off the brace and the epoxy hardened with the left side of the bridge about 1/8" above the top of the guitar.

I just remember waking up and going to take the clamps off, seeing only two clamps attached, and just thinking, "Oh, f***."

It would explain why he was hesitant to give me anything to work on for a few months after that It actually took a lot of me working on my own guitars and bringing them over and showing him to build trust that I was capable of good work.

At least it's been a big help later in my career where I get things in that customers have royally effed up. They'll be really embarrassed, showing me a pickguard they hacked up with a knife, body cavity they hacked out with a hammer and a chisel (and not cleanly), saddle screws fixed in place with red thread locker, nuts with gorilla glue foaming out around the profile.

I just think back to when I was 14 or 15 years old and the judgment just goes out the window. Whatever I see I'm just like well, I've probably done worse at some point in the past. I do love the customers that deny touching the truss rod and saying they got it new and it's never been adjusted in its life, then you look in there and the adjuster is just a straight up circle from being stripped so badly. My friend is more blunt where I'm much more hesitant to make anyone feel uncomfortable...

Same reason I just said "Yeah, you're probably right!" when a customer was adamant that his Taylor guitar was not a bolt-on neck. I told him they all were and Taylor never made a set neck guitar and he just adamantly said "Nope. I paid a lot for this and I know for a fact it's a set neck."

Anyway, enough banter from me for now. The hatchet bridge removal sounds right up my alley for humor. I'm sure we'd get along famously. And I'd love to stop by if I'm ever up there! I'm from Connecticut, so same goes for you, if you're ever in the area, would love to talk shop.

We have cold winters too but I think you've gotten us beat by a couple country miles there

Also, keeping on track with Bone Nuts and string spacing:

I got the idea from a picture of a Taylor LKSM-12. I noticed it had especially close string spacing of the string pairs, tried copying it for myself (with the pairs even closer together), and love it. Paired string nuts always seem to be a special beast, and the real test for me was doing a 12 string bass nut, with the tripled strings. But closing the gap on those pairs as much as possible without them buzzing really does open them up, at least for me -- eliminates accidental string muting and just makes the whole thing so much more of a joy to play.

For regular nuts, I stick to equal distance between the strings, as opposed to equal distance between the centers. Just the way I've always done it. I will say that with the caliper method, it can get very obsessive, trying to get the distance between the strings perfect. I've come to the conclusion that may be a waste of time and getting it "good enough" may be just that -- good enough.

Now, my preference has been for the caliper-as-a-fence method I came up with, but I'm not opposed to experimenting with more. I may even try experimenting with the SM ruler again and comparing it with my method, and seeing how close I can get both ways. The one potential issue with using calipers as a fence is the strings can move as you're holding the calipers against them if you're not careful. And Holding them against the high E string can be a bit touchy. Easy to get the B and E strings .010" too far apart just by pressing a little too hard.

Set marks are one thing, and cutting is another. The SM rule works for many...for my OCD brain I always end up doing the math and checking the space between the strings with calipers. I'm still trying to decide what a reasonable margin of error is. Say, the equal spacing is .265" between the strings, so all those inbetween spaces should measure .265".

That could be where eyeballing it comes in. And that can be tricky. So while my current method is working great for me, there's always room for improvement. The benefit of forums like this is they help to establish a standard that's never talked about anywhere else, because the only guys who have any clue about stuff are the ones who are doing it all the time. Gonna read through this thread again and the suggestions people've made and see if I can tame my OCD with nut spacing a bit.

Another saying my friend and mentor has, that he got from his dad who was in the Airforce in WWII:

"If it looks right, it'll fly right."

Same could go for a lot of guitar operations! So hard for me to leave the overthinking at the door which is one reason I've avoided going full time with this. Might drive myself more crazy than I already am

"If it looks right, it'll fly right." I like that!!

Very cool and thanks for hanging in with me Matt.

One of the things you may find interesting that Dave has been writing up forever for publication but it's not ready yet is a fret spacing study. He got some long calipers and started measuring to the thou the fret spacing of various vintage guitars. The idea is that the makers used jigs and as such there is a forensic foot print of sorts that they all have where a fake could be spotted by fret spacing.

Our legacy is our students and there are a couple dozen of them on this forum alone who took our two day fretting and set-up courses. An intensive and different approach to the bread and butter of Lutherie and what happens when you recognize at some point that building a guitar is not just a woodworking project it's a tool for a musician and has to be set-up properly....

He also studied the rule of 13 and other spacing variations exhaustively as well and comments on error rates and tuning issues associated with the various methods. It's real left brain stuff with a database now of over 400 vintage instruments.

We were offered a PLEK free of charge and turned it down favoring the accuracy of hand work and our own methodology.

I've played Robben Ford's 58 and it was exquisite to play and hear and I have played two 59's one belonging to a famous musician that I do not have permission to use his name but it was killer too, especially the neck shape and we have all heard this LP on half a dozen albums.

We have a client who is a famous jazz musician and he's in his 80's now and paranoid when he brings anyone of his two original D'Aquistos that were built for him with his name on them to us for repair. So he has a Vietnam era Vet Navy Seal as a friend and security when he has "to go to the city" with the geetars.

We have another jazz great who played with Miles Davis and talk about fret work his fretless has to be perfect to perform as he likes.

You friend is right about running it like a business and trust and Lutherie are fragile blow it once with a client and they are gone and if not you may wish that they were.... Because of the Internet and people spreading BS we have to waste a lot of time on expectations that people have that are BS and we won't agree in advance to have that be the acceptance criteria for our work. Or, in other words claims of some tonal benefit. People think they hear all manner of things and the Internet at times supports snake oil claims and that's always a struggle to not get any of that on us.

Our minimum repair is a full set-up which I do the vast majority of them. It's our largest revenue source and about 60% of our business and we charge about $100 out the door for what I do. It varies from guitar to guitar of course based on individual needs but our set-ups fix most everything necessary that is not structural in nature from fret ends that are proud to a loose Jesus bolt on a Seagull and of course all the set-up stuff too action, relief, nut slots and a full cleaning and conditioning of various wood parts.

In the winter much of our work is crack repair and rehumidifying dried out instruments. We only work on guitars, mandos, basses and b*njos.

We will not adjust a truss rod or throw new stings or one string on and we won't sell anyone anything we are repair only, minimum of a set-up or $95 bench fee and we found that we had to do this to be viable and profitable over the years. For us to take pen to paper and simply write up a receipt and take in an instruments has overhead costs that are substantial and most of all being owner operators we have the opportunity cost of I have to stop working on Paul's Les Paul to evaluate and take in Peter's Tele. We don't have a music store or want one taking stuff in for us we want full control of what we accept or reject and who as well.....

I'm sure your friend would agree that the romance of Lutherie that is portrayed and sought after on the Internet forums and the reality of a brick and mortar Lutherie business are two very different things.

Anyway cool Matt. It looks right to me so it should fly right!

We'd all be in complete agreement. My friend's biggest gripe is very expensive guitars that come into the shop that are not set up well. Multiple 5 and 10 thousand dollar guitars I've seen with sub-par nuts, bad setups, and occasionally even design flaws such as loose neck blocks and more.

A lot of guys get into building as a woodworking project. For both me and my friend we were players first, then working on them came second. It's very common to see guitars that look great, even phenomenal, but don't play well because there was no time put into making a good nut, setup, and fretwork.

And oh, for sure. He doesn't post online anymore, but years ago got flack for "not being a real luthier" because he was advocating the use of CA glue and epoxy for certain repairs. His usual retort to such people is something like, "That's all well and good if you want to stick to some idyllic old world fantasy about being a traditional luthier, but I live in the real world and have to actually make money at this. I can't have repairs coming back and I need to use methods that I know are going to work every time without fail."

His thing has *always* been about survival. He mentioned how when he started working for Dan Armstrong in Manhattan back in '69 he was homeless and sleeping in stairwells for two weeks before he got paid enough to actually afford a place to stay. Dan's shop was the place to go, lots of high profile musicians coming in, and Dan demanded perfection. My friend saw him sack a lot of people, and there would be a LOT of yelling if anything went wrong.

He said he remembers standing there holding a router and shaking in fear while Dan was walking down the aisle holding up a guitar someone had screwed up a repair on, yelling "Who the F*** did this!!" over and over again. And then chewed the guy out for about 15 minutes before firing him. His response to the guy asking for his check for the week was "Are you f***ing kidding me! This is going to cost me more than two weeks of your pay to fix! Get the f*** out of here!"

My friend only had positive things to say about Dan; his wicked temper sounds awful but he did say the quality of his work was top notch, and one of the reasons he liked my friend was he was always able to perform and go above and beyond what he expected. He never personally got yelled at so at least for him it was all good He also learned to not take on repairs he knew he couldn't fix, or might screw up, as he saw what happened to the people who tried and failed!

He ended up actually getting very close with Dan, which is a testament to the bonds that can be formed with a mentor and apprentice. Basically the same as me and my friend. Met his son in 7th grade, started hanging out there, and before long I was just going over and heading straight down to the basement to watch his dad work on guitars all day after school and learn whatever I could.

But anyway: that was a true trial by fire for him. Before he got to know Dan better and gained his trust he was in constant fear of losing his job and had a lot of pressure to do great work. Superglue and epoxy were staples there for certain jobs, so anyone telling him it's not acceptable, his response is the same: "I can't have repairs coming back and customers being unhappy."

Both me and my friend however could learn a lot from your business examples. He has not raised his prices in ages and ages and does not charge anywhere near enough for the quality of his work. And I'm the same way. I always tend to lowball everything, and part of the reason I burned out was from taking on too many jobs for too little money, and feeling like I had obligations to fulfill when really, I wasn't getting much out of it, not even the money I deserved.

So similarly to having 'real world experience' doing repairs, you guys got the business aspect down. That's something I haven't figured out, and while my friend is getting by, he could've used a lot more of that in his career. Not taking anything in for under $100 seems like an actual huge time saver. Not worth wasting the shop space on small projects, then all the people who disappear, dodge payments, and the rest. I currently have way more guitars taking up space here than I'd like -- and it is a huge headache!

Customer psychology and the whole business aspect is like a whole craft unto itself. I'll be paying attention to your posts and watching out for anything I can glean there. The biggest risk of not having that knowledge is crashing and burning, which I've done several times after many sleepless nights working my butt off to no avail. The real tragedy is well meaning people working hard and thinking that working harder and putting more effort in and accepting little to no money will translate to success eventually...

...when in reality, it just gets you more of the same. Working hard only works when you're working the right way. Something I've struggled to learn for a long time now!

Anyway, man. All that about fretwork. That is my biggest area of interest. And kudos to fretless leveling. I've only done a couple fretless conversions and everything that's hard about fretwork is much harder on fretless. Now you gotta deal with the whole surface area instead of just the fret tops. More areas to buzz and choke out. The only saving grace is when players like that "growl" from the strings rattling on the board just a tiny bit.

For a while I was taking refrets so far that I'd level them under string tension, and try to get them playing perfectly *without* frets before installing the frets. It was a fun experiment a few times though I no longer do this, and of course you have to consider compression when fretting changing the relief/profile of the neck.

I'm always, always up for learning more. I definitely get the "living and breathing guitar" part, and that's me too. I haven't gotten high in a while but I do appreciate it and if I'm ever in the area that would be a fun time I could talk about just fretwork alone for hours and would love to hear someone more experienced talk about it and pick their brain over it.

Matt your friend sounds great and he's a real world guy so I appreciate him being pissed at the judgmental jerks who are quick to rule out this glue or that glue. We use CA and ep*xy and the trick is where it's "appropriate for the instrument..."

My business partner and I are in our 10th year of this business and had two others before this one and we turn away 50% of what comes out way for bandwidth issues. I just got home and went in at 3:00 Am on a Sunday we have so much work to do.

Great to have you here Matt.

I use the Stew Mac string spacing ruler to mark the positions on the nut. But I don't use an angle bracket to draw the line for the cut, instead I use a long ruler from the center of the stringpin hole to the mark in the nut. Due to the trapezoid fretboard, the lines are not exactly perpendicular. Especially if the fretboard is more trapezoid than usual. The big challenge is to cut the slot according to the line!

Anyway, it's faster than using the angle bracket the way I do it.

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I always felt like it would be more important to accommodate the angle of the string breaking away from the nut towards the tuning peg when cutting the string slots on the nut than it would be important to ensure the nut slot is straight in line with the string. The string will break away from the nut regardless, so it seems to me that the less surface area holding the string in place the better the tuning stability.

For anyone wanting to practice, using a beater guitar with a cheap nut is great. Fill all the slots with baking soda or bone dust and superglue, and practice cutting slots to the correct spacing. You can do it over as many times as you like.

You'll also get very good at cleanly filling nut slots, which is a very good skill to have.

Making a new nut every time when you're just trying to work on slot spacing is impractical. Better to use a beater, fill it, slot it, rinse and repeat until getting good string spacing is habituated into your brain. Once you're confident you've built your slotting skills up then it would be worth it to cut a new nut from a bone blank or whatever material you choose.

The one caveat here is when I'm making a new nut, I always leave a slight overhang on either side, so I can move the nut laterally to get the outside string spacing perfect. Either a little left or a little right until the two outside E strings are the exact same distance from their respective fret bevels.

Not being able to do that really requires you to cut those slots dead-on from the first stroke of the file. Not a bad challenge.

String spacing at the nut can literally make or break any stringed instrument. It's so critical that it's worth every hour of work you put in to get it right.

People keep talking about getting beater guitars and broken guitars but so far I’ve had a hard time finding one that isn’t falling painfully less short of “new” guitar prices that it hardly seems worth getting just for this level or practice. So perhaps I need to pull out the least favorite guitar from my collection and call it a “beater” and practice on it even though I like it a lot? Or maybe buy a Monoprice guitar or a Costco guitar?

I’ve given up on a garage sale guitar. I’ve gone to a bunch of garage sales and all I see are amber colored ashtrays and cracked faux leather handbags and floor lamps that look like they’d be best suited for a bonfire. I mean, not to pick on my neighbors who seem to buy this stuff like it’s the devil’s candy but so far I’m not seeing any guitars worth practicing lutherie

I realize this is sort of a non sequetir but I just want you all to feel my pain.

Where I always weigh-in here is in suggesting to folks that the "beater" or "mule" that you find to learn some repair work has actual and real value in the kinds of repair work or final set-up for builders things that you will do to it such as nut making, bridge removal or gluing, fretting, neck resets, etc.

With this said the best beaters out there are old Harmony guitars that have a proper dovetail neck joint. With one of these you will even be rewarded with a guitar that is functional and may sound pretty OK when you are done with it.

My first neck reset was a Harmony Sovereign and I refretted it, reglued the bridge, made new nut and saddle and delivered it back to the customer. We had a customer back then 15 years or so who agreed to let a novice work on it, we are honest ya know... in exchange for a reduced labor rate. I've done many resets since and countless nuts, saddles, refrets, bridge reglues and it all started for me with this single Harmony.

Harmony's do command a price these days but if you want bang for your learning buck they are my number one recommendation.

Check out Thomann Music. Harley Benton brand guitars. Very affordable, and fixed up, they can be world-class, at least when it comes to the electric guitars (no experience with their acoustics yet). I have one of their 7 string multi-scale fan fret electric guitars that I set up and wound a new set of humbuckers for, and it's a phenomenal instrument now. I've refurbished about 20 of them for a few local customers, and they all came out amazing. In general they are phenomenally priced for the quality. I was thoroughly impressed with this 7 string, and I got a B-stock one for $165.

As for practicing on beater guitars, I recommend this, but truth be told, I always experimented on my own guitars, including my most prized ones.

Especially with nuts, as long as you remove the one that's in there carefully and don't break it, you're home free. You can fit blanks and slot them an infinite number of times until you're satisfied, and if you really hit a wall and can't figure it out, just put the old nut back in.

I've spent countless hours making nuts, and in my early days, I required a lot of do-overs. I'd try and try and try again, to no avail, but eventually I got the hang of it. The method I use these days, using a double square as a fence to space the outside strings, and the caliper jaws to space the inside, really speeds things along for me. You'll find your own methods as you develop your skills, and find what works for you.

The most important thing is to just start doing it. And again, for something as benign as a nut, as long as you can cleanly remove the one that's already in there, there's no need to get a guitar to practice on. Now, if you're going to be practicing neck resets, as Hesh has pointed out, then it might be a good idea! That's what I'm thinking of doing as I don't have any experience in acoustic guitar neck resets. With jobs that have extremely high potential for damage/ruining a guitar, a beater is in order. I wouldn't consider a nut to be in that category, though you do need to be careful removing the nut.