Month: August 2020

DO NOT TOUCH the nut slots…ever!

Amit Newton 5 Comments

I am outside the country for a little break, but while here, an interested reader raised a query which has resulted in this blog post. His question was which tool I used to lower the string slots of a nut.

I told him I used nothing, because I never lower the slots!

As eyebrow-raising as you might find it, I don’t like to touch nut slots. If I have to lower the first fret action, I take measurements of how much lower I want the strings, loosen them, knock the nut out, and sand its bottom as much as I wish to lower the strings, just like I would work on a saddle.

Let me explain this a little more clearly. When reducing the action on an acoustic guitar, changes have to be made at three places:

  1. The truss rod (for dialing in the exact amount of relief required),
  2. The saddle (shaving it to bring down the action to the required height at the 12th fret), and lastly
  3. The saddle slots (to get the required action at the 1st fret)

While the first two procedures are relatively straightforward, the third one is seriously tricky. Ideally, you want the strings to sit just half their diameter in their respective slots.

So, if you bring down the action by lowering the nut slots, what happens to the half-and-half rule?

Yes, I know that the world over, action at the 1st fret is brought down by filing down the nut slots. But is there any harm in taking a different route from the known and recognised wisdom which may yield better results?

Of course, taking the first route, you loosen a single string, work on its slot, put the string back and tune up. In the second case, you loosen all strings, take the nut out and sand its bottom.

But it is quite possible that you may have to take off a little more from either the bass or the treble side than the other one. All that one needs to do is measure properly, mark accurately and sand slowly…you overshoot the lines and you are looking at making a new nut! 

But what is the problem in filing the nut slots, you may ask? The problem lies in the angles that you create with whichever tool you use to file down the slots. Instead of the slots being just lowered, your tool may deepen the slot at one side more than the other. It may even alter the points of contact of the string in the nut, affecting intonation.

Badly cut nut slots may also pinch strings in them, which is a major cause of tuning issues, string breakage. How often have you heard a string go ‘pinnnnggggggggg’ while you’re tuning it up? That sound is the effect of a string caught in nut slot and finally releasing. You may also recall the nightmare you experienced tuning that particular string.

The (bone) nuts I use, are cut through a CNC, and have near perfect string slots. The only alteration I need to make to them is to dial in the exact height they need to stand to, to give the perfect 1st fret action.

The only time that I work on the string slots, is if I have to lower between .004″ and .002″! Then, I just use old strings as saws! It takes a lot of attention and lots of elbow grease but the job gets done.

This was one helluva job III (the add-ons)

Amit Newton 1 Comment

When you do such extensive work, like what I did on this Hobner, a little extra effort, a little something from my side, helps sweeten the deal for the customer. Plus, if there is something that does not sit easy in your eye, how can you just let it go?

After I had swapped the old, drab tuners for those snazzy, sexy things, I looked around at the guitar and decided that the old strap button was an eyesore with the rest of the flashy steel on the guitar.

So I swapped this

for this.

I looked at the headstock and in all that beauty, what stood out dirty and a blemish was the trussrod cover and the the oxidised screw holding it in place.

I cleaned up the piece of plastic and installed a shiny new screw that matched the rest of the glitz on the headstock.

Of course, the love potions – for the fretboard, bridge and frets – were mandatory

and the 12-string received these strings, as this is the customer’s preferred brand and gauge.

As I was stringing the instrument up, I noticed the nut

Not in the most healthy state but I was unwilling to pop it out and replace it with a bone nut that would have to be cut down to half its height. Let me explain. In an instrument with a zero fret, it is that fret that takes care of the intonation part. The nut merely serves to hold the strings in place so that they don’t fall off.

To cut down a bone nut just for the purpose of holding strings, I did not have the heart to do. I have ordered a plastic nut and as soon as it comes in, I shall call the instrument in and replace it.

I was still looking at the guitar, debating whether or not I should put a pickguard on it or not.

Finally, I decided to put one on because where the pickguard would go, was a crack in the top that ran the entire length of the top. The left picture shows the crack at the top, while the right photo shows the crack running right down to the very bottom of the guitar (the black line farthest from you).

Though the crack had been sealed but the pickguard would be added protection, holding things together.

I could have easily decided to throw on a ready-made, teardrop-style pickguard but that would have gone against the character of this instrument. This one was different, and thus, required something different.

So, I decided to design one, cut and fashion one by hand. But first, I had to put down on paper, what I had in mind.

After this was done, I traced the outline on the pickguard plate

continuing to make modifications to the design as I thought were necessary.

A new blade was put into the X-acto knife for a good clean cut and extra, focused light was arranged for

Once cut,

there followed the smoothing of edges so that nothing would catch on the edges.

Some sandpaper
A fresh single-edge blade

Those two things helped me get things smooth and bevelled. Installing the prepared pickguard was no big deal.

I also noticed that the name of the guitar (on its shoulder) was disappearing. So, I pulled out my calligraphy pens and my lighted lens set-up and went to work

I could have left it like that but it was not a brand new guitar, so, before the ink dried, I gently brushed it off, giving it an aged look.

The pickguard, strap button, screw and filling in the name, I did not charge for.

With this, the three-episode serial ends, and I hope that the Hobner goes on to sing many, many more tunes.

 

This was one helluva job II (tackling issues)!

Amit Newton 3 Comments

Last week, you took a look at the problems. This week, you shall see me sorting them out.

The order in which I decided to go about the work was this:

  1. Take off bridge
  2. Clean bridge and area on top where it would sit
  3. Clean guitar body of epoxy glue
  4. Glue bridge back
  5. Install new tuning machines

Taking the bridge off

It is never too difficult to take off a bridge that is lifting, but of course, there are exceptions. This one did not give me too much trouble. A few spatulas and palette knives and it was off.

The photo on the right gives you a very clear picture of where the bridge was lifted up from, how much and for how long. You may be able to guess the answer to the first two questions, for the third, suffice it to say, that you won’t see dust build up like that in a few weeks or even a few months.

 

Cleaning bridge and area on top where it would sit

Now that it was off, I set about cleaning first the bridge. Here is the bridge through a few stages of cleaning.

After it was thoroughly clean, I wiped it down with lighter fluid and scored the underside with an awl – not very deeply – but just enough for the glue to sit in and have something to grip on to. But very pretty wood.

Notice, there are two locating pins in the bridge that help seat it exactly where it should.

But that was just the underside of it. The top of it, which had collected dust over the years and had braved the elements, needed to be cleaned too. Here are some of the tools I used to clean it.

Sandpaper of different grits stuck on different contoured objects to reach every nook and cranny. That black pen-like thing is a nail cuticle remover. The middle one a PVC pipe leftover, and the one on the right is just a wood block I fashioned for the purpose.

Then followed the area of the top where the bridge would sit. Cleaning old glue residue completely off it and off the underside of the bridge is imperative because unless the old glue is removed, the bond with the new glue won’t be a very strong one.

The photo on the left is the bridge area cleaned, while the one on the right shows, how much glue and dust came off it. Blades, scrapers, knives: oh, I went to town on it!

And while I was armed with all these, I decided to scrape clean the binding too.

 

Cleaning the guitar body of epoxy glue

After that it was the turn of taking the epoxy resin glue off the front, sides and back of the guitar. Before I started on that, I thought long and hard about the tool(s) that I would use. After much choosing and rejecting, I turned to my trustee wood-carving micro chisels.

After that it was a good two hours of dripping sweat as I carefully peeled and chipped away at the glue. At places, it came off whole, while at others, it entailed more sweat.

When it was finally over, both the guitar top and me were breathing a little easier.

Once the top was clean, it was the turn of the back and sides.

And when you have a lifting seam like this,

you require a really thin and small dispenser to get glue into the opening. Something like this:

Installing new tuning machines

While this dried, I decided to take the old tuning machines off and clean up the headstock of the guitar. It was a good thing that I did that because, when I tried on the snazzy, new tuning machines, they wouldn’t go in. Holes for the old tuning machines were much smaller and had to be reamed!

Reaming is a painfully slow process and you have to go slow, otherwise, if you overshoot the mark, there is nothing else to be done but to fill up the hole completely and start all over again!

You can see the reaming taking place in the left photo, as also the new tuning machines waiting to be installed. The photo on the right shows the need for clamping the neck down so that the strain of reaming the headstock did not get transferred to the neck. If it did, it was quite possible that the neck would crack, or even break into two!

And that was not the end of the work on the headstock. The holes where the screws of the old tuning machines went in, did not match up to where the screws of the new machines would go. So, I had to fill up the holes with pieces of wood, mark the point where the new screws would go in, and then drill out new holes.

Fitting the new tuning machines was just a matter of 24 screws and a Philips-head screwdriver .

Here’s how the headstock looks now:

Later, it was time to give a bath to the guitar and clean it of the years of dust and grime deposition. But before that could happen, the area where the bridge would stick to the top had to be covered and protected from getting wet.

That’s painter’s tape and on top of it, packing tape, cut exactly to size.

Meanwhile, the process of ‘bathing’ the guitar included dry sanding the entire body with ‘0000’ steel wool and then wet-sanding with 2000, 3000 and 4000 grit sandpaper. 

That black block you see is hard foam, used in packaging, and something that I picked up from the road.

The final step was polishing the entire body. Of course, the intention was never to make it look like a brand new guitar but for it to look like a well-cared-for guitar.

 

Glueing the bridge back

Once everything was clean and smelling good, it was time to glue the bridge back on. But before that, both surfaces had to be as dry as they could be. So, I employed my heat gun to dry out the bridge area of whatever moisture might have crept under the ‘covers’.

And while that dried, I gathered everything that I would need for the glue-up job.

And the glue? Here it is, and more than was required. While doing a glue-up job like this, I have realised that there is no such thing as too much. If it is too much, it will ooze out and can be wiped away. If it is too little, the joint won’t hold.

The photo on the extreme right features a violin clamp. Not a very powerful clamp but then it has a lot of reach. You clamp bridges to tops by clamping through the soundhole, and usually, the distance from the soundhole edge to the farther edge of the bridge is 5 -6 inches. This Hobner’s bridge was fixed some 8″ away! Only a few of my collection of clamps had that kind of reach and so I had to ‘deploy’ my pair of violin clamps.

Put it in place, clamp everything together such that not even the air will be able to get through

and once the glue starts oozing out from under the bridge, wipe, wipe, wipe, and then wipe again. For once the glue dries, there’s no way to get it off, except with a scraper or a chisel.

While the glue dried, I went about shaping the new bridgepins.

Also, all that scraping on the top of the guitar had left scratches and marks just inside the margin on the lower bout that weren’t very pleasing to the eye.

I thought about it and came up with this:

My reasoning: 30+ years for a guitar’s age translates into it being a teenager. And like any teenager, there’s no harm if it experiments a little with its looks. So, I taped off the binding and the inside of the top, leaving a 1cm channel in between, which I painted black. With the white tape removed, it did come out looking nice.

HOWEVER…

I have done such glue-up ‘operations’ umpteen times without a single failure. I failed this time, and rather magnificently. The law of averages had caught up with me. And the only reason, I could think of why I faced so many failures was the moisture in the air.

In all, I had to reglue the bridge four times!  Here is the view of the re-glue efforts the 2nd time, the 3rd time and the 4th time, and each time I left it clamped for longer and longer: 60 hrs, 72 hrs, 96 hrs and then a full week.

And each time, these went under the top to provide support and increase clamping pressure.

It stuck the fourth time but I don’t think its going to stay that way for too long.

NEXT TIME: Some free gifts, some odds and ends!

 

This was one helluva job (and it ain’t over yet)!

Amit Newton Leave a comment

The rains is a time when all glueing jobs should be avoided. If imperative, enough time and ventilation should be available for the job to succeed. REMEMBER YOU READ IT, AND READ IT HERE FIRST!

Despite knowing that I undertook this job, and boy, did this guitar fight back! Read all about it later. 

First, the Rule of Two struck again! 

Remember just a couple of weeks ago I worked on a Hobner guitar and gave you the lowdown on the company? Well, its 30-some-years-old, 12-string cousin came calling, and seeing the pain it was in, made me go ‘ooh’, ‘aah’, ‘ouch’!

While the earlier model was a F-hole, floating bridge-type jazz guitar, this one was the regular flat-top guitar (although the top wasn’t all that flat), with a round soundhole.

The history. A former Army officer’s instrument, it travelled with him through postings and remained his friend and confidante. And as can be imagined, he loved it very much. (And from here my guesswork begins) Somewhere down the line, the officer stopped playing it and the instrument was left tuned to pitch, standing in some corner (or hanging on a wall).

Weather can be very unkind to string instruments and it treated this 12-string no different. Under the dual impact of the weather and under-tension strings, the bridge lifted off the solid-top guitar (yeah, even I had my eyes popping out when I discovered that it was a solid top. I had never seen a Hobner with a solid top – not very good spruce but spruce nonetheless). The top itself too cracked open at multiple places – besides along the seams. 

That ruler that you see is wooden and quite thick. Do you see how much of it is able to go under the bridge?

And because of the bridge lifting, it had also managed to pull a belly into the top. Also, the fretboard extension was loose from one end.

(As my guesswork continues) The officer’s daughter, much in love with her father, tried to stabilise the instrument. Acting out of love (I am sure her intentions were all good) and with whatever she thought was the strongest glue available (I think at least 15 years ago), she used an epoxy resin glue – all along the seams on the top and back, the heel, and where the heel cap should have been!

Now, epoxy resin glues are fine for furniture, but for string instruments and especially on those areas which need to move, it does more harm than good.

She used the same adhesive on the cracks on the top and when the guitar did not look too good, covered it with some electrical insulating tape. The black lines in the first photograph (and below right) is the tape hiding the adventure! And the elements continued to act on the instrument and on the electrical tape-epoxy combine. When I tried to remove the tape, at places it came off and at others, something came off while the rest of the black remained ‘absorbed’ in the epoxy. 

Here are some other samples:

There were other abrasions too: like this section of the heel. Notice the discoloured margin on the left? It seems as if the heel wasn’t seated properly. But it was! Solid as ever and not wishing to budge no matter how much I pulled or pushed it.

Also, a 2-inch portion of the side (on the right) just below the binding (the white strip) had come loose and was loose till an inch below, where it opened up in a crack.

The headstock, as beautiful as it was, was a pain as far as getting strings off it was concerned. Someone had knotted all strings – increasing my BP!

The tuning machines that came with the instrument were cheap, flimsy things. At the time when Hobner must have made this instrument, these tuning machines must have been the only ones available. Not so now. Now, even the cheap tuning machines would be many times better than these and there are sets available now that cost three, four times the cost of a cheap guitar!  These had to go!

And when you have a 30-odd-year-old instrument, there are bound to be more hurdles than smooth sailing.

Half a screwhead! How do you get that out? Pliers! Of course!

And so, it wasn’t a surprise that I pulled out this instead of a regular bridgepin –  a piece of wood fashioned to serve as a bridgepin: ingenious and practical, but hardly pretty.

And after 30-some years, there are bound to be more than a couple of dustworms inside the guitar!

My brief from the Fauji: ‘Yaar, you do whatever you want, but I should be able to play it’! As you can imagine, this will take some doing, and for you, some reading. So, we’ll break this one up in a few parts (at least two) so that it doesn’t become too laborious a read.

 

Next week: Tackling the problems

 

 

 

 

A shattered nut makes this 12-string a dull boy!

Amit Newton 2 Comments

Ladies and gentlemen, another 12-string visitor that I had the pleasure of giving my attention to. And like I had said some time back, the same make and model guitars visit in twos and threes, by some quirk of nature. So, here is another Pluto!

What made it special was that it was a daughter’s gift to her father!

And just beyond the lower end of the photo on the left above, lay the problem that needed to be addressed. Though a comparatively new guitar, the strings had managed to break the (plastic) nut on the guitar.

Sadly, the owner had failed to find a place in town to replace a nut for a 12-string guitar, leave alone a bone 12-string nut! It was then that the guitar came to me.

As I inspected the instrument, it was apparent that it had not received the initial set-up so necessary for it to function best. It had all the tell-tale signs: loose hardware on the headstock, dry fretboard and bridge, and tarnished frets. The action too was on the higher side and could have been much better.

Further, it did not make sense to just replace the nut and leave the (plastic) saddle in place. So, out came both and were replaced by bone elements.

As I pulled out the saddle, I was shocked to see something in the slot. A SHIM!!! And not just one, but two! After I prised them out, I noticed that they were nothing but visiting card strips. I remember thinking unconsciously, ‘That should take care of the high action’. And it did!

Replacing the saddle was the usual grind – pun intended – getting it to the same dimensions as the plastic one that had long been chucked.

The new bone saddle (the one on the right) was just a wee bit longer than the plastic one. Once the dimensions were met, I tried putting the saddle in its slot and was surprised to find the saddle rocking in it, as if there was a high spot in the slot.

In all my years of guitar repair and working on very inexpensive instruments too, I have never come across an instrument that had an uneven saddle slot cut into the instrument. I looked at the slot intently but I could not see anything wrong there.

Then I took my special saddle-slot chisel and tried scraping the bottom of the slot and sure enough, the chisel scraped up some pieces of wood that had been left when the slot must have been routed.

With this out, the saddle sat proud and straight in its slot. Perfect!

And as I have pointed out before, if you wish to determine whether it is a bone nut or saddle, or a plastic one, just look at its underside. If you see holes there, believe that it is synthetic. Some time back, I had talked about other ways as well to figuring out whether what you’re holding was plastic or bone.

If you wish to read about those, here it is:

Happy 2020, and let’s bone in on nuts and saddles!

That done, I looked at the hardware and gave it a gentle tightening. Remember, it is part of your monthly instrument upkeep: going over the hardware on the headstock. Using the right-sized spanner, test the nuts on the face of the headstock. They should be as snug you requiring just a little bit of force to loosen them. While tightening them, don’t mistake them for nuts on your car wheel, on which you use all the force you can muster to tighten! Just snug enough, and just like this:

Now, turn the guitar over, and  still concentrating on the headstock, take the right-sized screwdriver to tighten the tuning machine screws. Again the rule of thumb is snug and not overbearingly tight. Just like this:

With that out of the way, it was time to let the ‘Love Potions’ work their magic: one for the fretboard and bridge and one for the fretwires.

Look at how pretty the wood looks now. In fact, look at how pretty the whole guitar looks now, dusted, polished, tightened and oiled.

It wasn’t a forbiddingly expensive instrument but as I played it, sweet sounds emanated from it. I hope the owner thinks so too!