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I just did a fret dress on an Ibanez with a locking (Floyd Rose) trem. There's still lots of meat on these very jumbo frets, but after levelling and dressing, the action at the nut (after removing the brass shim) is a tad high on the b and high e string. With a conventional nut I'd just cut the slots lower, but obviously this isn't so simple with a locking nut. I'll likely just leave it as it's right on the line, the strings are very light and it doesn't go out of tune when I play the first few frets. But if a person was to dress these frets again there'd be a problem.

So what is the typical approach to this situation? Grind the bottom of the locking nut? Buy a different locking nut that sits lower? Refret, since going too low on these jumbo frets loses the benefit of big frets anyway?

You can sand down the bottom of the lock nut.
Takes some patience to do by hand but it works.

The locking nut is harder than the hubs of hell. Don't sand it down. Besides - if you get it too low, you'll have to shim it up.

Conor, you've hit on the very reason why Floyd style locking nuts SUCK. No adjustability by the usual methods. Just juggle them the best you can. I try to talk clients into letting me install a proper bone nut with locking tuners... But that's usually more money than they want to spend.

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

You don't have to try to hard to convince me Chris!

I think I sanded one of those on the belt Sander a few years ago. Emphasis on the "think". Lol

Just need to keep checking it with the calipers like you would do an acoustic saddle.

Pat

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Pat

Hey Connor - get a cup of water and a snug fitting glove such as leather and grind down the nut on a belt sander It gets very hot...) until you see the high e nut slot is around .001" higher than the first fret and the fret plane and the low e is around .004 higher than the fist fret and the fret plane.

It's a hit and miss operation where I sand, drop the hot nut into my cup of water to cool it, dry it quickly in a paper towel and hold in place and check clearance. As mentioned if you go too low you can always shim back up. Shims are not an issue on a hardware store that some people call guitars such as a Floyd equipped thing. Most Luthiers who work in the trade that I know make the nut too low intentionally and the shim until the get the respective heights that they like on the bass and treble side.

We like to go shimless if we don't go too far as kind of sort of an internal competition thing we do here each trying to do the best work possible in a competitive spirit.

Now how do you know that the nut slot on say the high e is .001" above the fret plane. Dave Made a special tool that has been milled perfectly flat and spans the first three frets. It has a probe/paddle attached to a dial indicator on one end. Our students saw and used this while at our place. No pics of it here at my place at 7:00 AM. The paddle sits in the individual nut slots and reads out the variance from the fret plane of the first three frets. It's killer and can be used to verify visually that a nut slot is too low and the true source of buzzing too.

If you do not have a tool to measure slot depth the going too low and shimming back up with metal shim stock and differing thickness and amounts of shims of both sides of the nut like most Luthiers do is fine too.

One last thing. These poor things, Floyd equipped instruments rarely get set-up as well as possible by Luthiers because of this operation that you are struggling with. So what happens is they leave the slots too high and on an instrumented coveted by "shredders" who love uber low action AND on an instrument with JUMBO frets. High nut slots in this set-up adds up to intonation problems for sure and notes playing sharp. Causes are the nut slots are too high so the strings are additionally stretched more so than necessary when fretting notes. The remedy if fixing the symptom in hack world.... is raising the action of adding relief or both and either will be counter to what a shredder player wants.

That's why we charge more to work on these because we do more and take more time to again, as I always preach here... be sure to cut the nut slots as low as possible. With this said because of the nature of the beast and intended use of these instruments very low nut slots are important and critical to a great set-up. They really are everywhere else too for fretted guitars.

Lastly of course a Floyd nut is a compromise. Since we don't do the individual slots we set the height for the high e and low e only and check to be sure that the rest follow suite and are not too low or even too high. They can be filed down individually too but I've never had to do this.

Good luck to you my friend and I hope that you are doing well and staying safe. I've been playing a lot and am currently working on Clapton's killer solo, one of the best ever done in my opinion in the Blind Faith tune Presence of the Lord. I'm close to nailing it and the more pot I smoke the better it sounds

Hi to everyone else too.

Well hi back, Hesh. I’m only here sporadically, but nearly fell off my chair when your name popped up. Glad to hear you’re doing well.
T


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Amen, and Amen. I charge double for setting up a Floyd.



Truer words were never spoken.
I spit on Floyd Rose's grave (and he's not even dead yet).

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

Everyone who works on guitars hates Floyd Rose's.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

And yet many worship them like they would a golden calf.

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

As long as they're willing to pay the upcharge I'll work on them. The few that I get in seem to have no problem with that.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Hey Chris I hope that you and your Dad are doing great or as well as can be expected.

You charge double, we should do that too. They are a royal pain in the ass for sure.

We often have to pre-qualify expectations too for Floyd owners in so much as some of the licensed copies are made with inferior, soft metal that permits grooves to wear in the posts preventing the trem from returning to neutral and in tune consistently.

We have been charging $10 more for one which we do for a 12 string too (also more time suck) but maybe it's time to just double it.

Thanks Chris.

Hi ya Tim and I hope you are doing great too. I'm just visiting but thanks for the hello my friend.

Hey Steve! Yep we hate them too and with your engineering background I'm sure you can see all the over kill in the design too. Plus they weight a ton all up.

A Floyd equipped instrument is not a guitar it's a hardware store with strings on it....

Well, as it turns out my right hip totally went to hell in September and I haven't been able to work at the bench since then. Except for a few jobs while sitting on a pillow at the dining table, I've done bugger all. Fortunately, I have a total hip replacement scheduled for next Friday -- yippee!! Hospitals here are only doing "urgent" and "emergency" surgeries these days, due to COVID. I was fortunate enough to have my case bumped up in priority, due to my inability to be on my feet and tremendous pain, despite taking a boatload of opioids.

The phone keeps ringing, but clients have generally been understanding. Keen to get back to the bench.

Take it easy, Hesh, and reach out anytime.

Just went back and listened to that solo. It is pretty great. Clapton was such a mess during that whole period, you can really hear it (Derek and the Dominoes I'm looking at you...) But across the board I really love that era of recorded music. I was a teenager in the 90's so it wasn't really part of my formative years other than what dad played on the stereo, but the combination of grasping what could be accomplished in the album format creatively, and the limitations of having to actually capture a performance made for some really vital music.

Hey Tim: Here is wishing you a complete and speedy recovery. That sounds very painful and uncomfortable so good to hear you have help on the way.

Yeah IIRC Clapton and Ginger Baker were both struggling with herion back in the Blind Faith days and had recently embraced religion. It was also when he played a 335 through a Bassman and had a tone that I've craved all my life. Anyway classic stuff from some of the best musicians of my youth.

What I have always loved about the solo is how he takes a churchy sounding organ tune and then bumps it up into a sizzling release of an onslaught of sweet and even in a few cases angelic notes and then slows it back down and walks the solo back into the churchy sounding tune. Wow! Can't Find My way Home is another favorite and that single ever Blind Faith album is my all time favorite album because of these two tunes and a few more.

The real problem with Floyd locking nuts is that the quality of the diecast parts varies so widely. Per the article I sent Conor, the string heights can vary as much as .005 to .010 from part to part. I used to be a Floyd Rose dealer, and I took a bunch of them apart and measured with calipers and micrometers. Dimensions given by the maker (back then it was Kramer) varied widely. There was no consistency from part to part - no repeatability. Back then there were 5 different locking nuts (by radius and width), I have no idea these days because there are so many different makers (some licensed, some not).

Then there is the problem of the saddles. They advertised a few different radius sets - but upon disassembling and measuring all the parts, I found wide variations in sizes. Oftentimes - for best performance, I would juggle the saddles to get the closest correct string height and radius. You could grind the bottom of each saddle, but it was a tricky business.

I'm just talking about new stuff, okay? Once a client had played a guitar for a long time, dirt and acids from players skin took their toll over time. That added a new dimension of trouble for the luthier. Sometimes parts that were supposed to move stopped, and vice versa. That pin that holds the 2 pieces of a Floyd saddle together? It's tapered, only comes out from one direction. I made a jig to remove it and fabbed up a tool to drive it out (and then back in after cleanup).

Comparing Floyd Rose design and machining to Kahler, Ibanez, etc., is like comparing Fifties tech to today's tech. Floyd's design is crude (he was a jeweler by trade), and poorly executed by the companies who produced them. The originals didn't even have fine tuners. That was a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

What luthiers (and competent, informed players) want is a rugged and intelligent design, consistent production standards, adjustability, and dependability. That ain't the Floyd. And the player most associated with using and popularizing the Floyd didn't even own or play one for the first 3 Van Halen albums! Think about that, will ya? He got by with a darn good setup on a stock Fender trem, a brass nut, and a few tricks like boiling the strings to stretch them out before installation.

As I have pointed out many times (here and elsewhere), in an interview with Edward, he said "I like it, and I don't" in reference to the Floyd. Even he didn't think it was the bees knees.

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

Well said Chris! Thanks too for the suggestion on our pricing it's now going up

once upon a time stewmac made a floyd rose locking nut routing jig but no longer. the best way to remedy this is reroute the neck for the correct height for the locking nut. sanding/grinding the locking nut is always a pain as the OFR nut is made out or some hard stuff. the chances that one can grind it perfectly flat/straight are not that good w/o a mill machine on hand. Also, with the bottom of the nut not perfectly flat one can have tuning stability issues, lack of tone/sustain are just a couple of problems that can be expected. the nut is a tempered metal. heating it up extremely by grinding on it can change the temper of the metal and the nut will be softer in the future. just my 2 cents.

note: be careful when routing the nut slot as a little dab will do ya!!!

And routing the nut channel if you have to remove very much material weakens the neck where head stocks tend to break. You also have multiple screw holes there too and a truss rod cavity also all also weakening the neck if it tips over and does a face plant in the same area.

I disagree with you and it's not difficult to be pretty sure that a milled Floyd nut bottom is flat. It's also often lousy pot metal and distorts if it's screwed down very hard. Where you think that milling a nut bottom can cause tuning stability issues beats the hell out of me. What cause intonation issues is a slot left too high and too much finger pressure being needed to get a note. But tuning stability issues from milling the bottom of the nut flat, that's a reach.

Its pretty standard industry practice to mill Floyd nut bottoms and if one goes to far they shim. It's also what is taught in Lutherie schools. We don't shim and instead have a tool that registers on the first three fret tops and the inserts into the selected nut slot. We can read the height of the nut over the first fret. I often shoot for 0 on the high e because from experience I know that the string will arc a tad out of that slot and be higher than my measurement. So I will set up my nut to numbers that I measure and remeasure all along the way and this way I never go too low.

Anyway glad it works for you, I would not do it that way and disagree that milling the bottom of the Floyd nut is problematic in really any manner.

On this job I ended up sanding the bottom of the nut on my belt sander. I went slow and checked my work regularly. It ended up being no big deal.

That's what most people do and how it's also taught in some of the schools. Most Floyds these days are made with cheap, pot metal and are licensed copies. You can find them on $300 GLOs.... too which is relevant in so much as how we work on these hardware stores with strings.... has to make economic sense for the owner too not just us.

I have to add that it's a real reach for me to consider that milling the nut slot preserves tonal perfection on these again.... hardware stores with strings on them.... We of course make sure the slot is flat and we also know our platen on our belt sander that was Dan E's dad's (some Lutherie history for you...) but milling the bottom of the nut is not in any way going to keep these things from sounding just as badly as they usually sound.

As you can see I'm not a fan of Floyds for a bunch of reasons most of all serviceability sucks. Simply setting intonation is an exercise in not letting a saddle with the adjustment screw right smack under a string slide too far one way or the other when setting. We've also had countless clients panic because they removed all of the strings for a change and then the tremolo lodged itself crooked and way up on the body. Blocking was not a concept they knew about.

We charge more to do Floyds and we charge more for 12 strings too. We had a client who kept bringing us a Rik 12 and we kept raising the price so he would go somewhere else. He did and they began raising their prices too to ward him off (we know them are are friends, most pro luthiers are friends at least who I know). So the guy sold his Rik(s) because none of the area Luthiers wants to waste half a day putting 12 strings on one of these nightmares. Don't get me started on poor intonation and Rik's nearly $200 after market 12 string bridge with individual saddles. The thing has scratches all over it and looks like I made in my basement when I was drunk and 8 years old.... I know, I know Riks are historic but we also think they are crap.... and the dual truss rod situation is also BS. Rik is also the only one who strings their 12's in reverse with the courses reversed. There was a lawsuit over this some years back in Michigan where a client dropped off his Rik 12 for a new nut and the nut was made just like the OEM nut with the two strings in a course reversed because this is what Rik does. The client swore up and down that the shop made the nut wrong and it went to court and the client lost. Rik makes nuts differently and it's not better either.

Riks do have a cool jangly tone that I love in classic rock and roll but they are such a PITA to work on and the styling reminds me of when George Jetson holds out some cash for Jane and Jane snags his wallet. I miss Astro too, I need a dog and have been wanting one lately.

Sigh.

hey! just MHO! to each his own. I'm not goin to come out and say i disagree with you 100%. there is a time and place for both. use your discretion and choose wisely. the best was for most people probably would be grinding the bottom of the locking nut. god knows i used to do that back in the 80's when i was a teenager, but i personally have found that i get a better result from lowering the actual surface.