Nut and Tuners

I finished cutting the nut slot to width for the LSR nut.  I used a pull saw to get it close, and a file with masking tape on its short side to get the width correct (so I could take off material on the vertical face of the slot, without digging it any deeper).  I used needle files to flatten the bottom of the slot.  By the time I'd finished, the fit was tight but i'd undercut the slot on the bass side toward the first fret, just slightly.  No big deal I think.

This nut doesn't have fore and aft pressure on it like a locking nut, even thought it might look similar.  The nut has little pairs of ball bearings for each string to slide upon. So the two provided screws, tiny though they are, will hold it fine.  The instructions say to use some weird-ass drill size, and only that size - the danger, according to the instructions, is in twisting the screw head off.   I used a 1/16" which is a few hundredths too small, because I always think I know better.  It worked fine.  I put a little fishing reel oil on the threads before I put them in.  I used all of the shims provided.  If that's not enough, I'll make my own shims out of feeler gauges.

Then it was time to mark the location of the tuner holes.  The first method I used worked very poorly:  it consisted of push pins with fishing line between them running in the approximate position of real strings.  It was too hard to eyeball the lie over the nut angle, and too hard to mark the lines on the headstock under the fishing line.

Next I made a jig to suspend a length of aluminum angle stock over the neck from the heel end, and taped a piece of paper to the neck with the correct string spacing (gotten from my G&L S-500, which has nearly the same dimensions).

I used my trusty 6" ruler to drop the vertical down to the paper on the heel end, and to the headstock in two places on the other end.  This worked well because that ruler centered itself well in the ball bearings of the nut:

The I double-checked everything and made the lines:

You can see my attempt to sanity check the spacing.  I put the line delineating the row of tuner hole centers across the string lines, then measured the distance between each of the holes. I was a little annoyed and disturbed by the fact that they weren't perfectly regular, and that more importantly that the intervals got bigger going toward the nut/bass side.  Then I realized they should get wider because the string lines are a wee bit farther apart toward the nut, as they converge from heel to nut.  Okay.  Good enough?  It had better be, let me tell you.

Basswood doesn't like to be drilled.  It shreds a bit.  The tuner holes are 3/8", as specified by the StewMac instructions for the Steinberger Gearless tuners.

I brought the neck upstairs to look at it in daylight, thinking that it was nice-enough looking to be treated like family, finally.  It was at this moment that I nearly lost it:  I realized that the direct line from the nut to the centerline of each tuner goes right through the string-clamping knob on the tuner to the left, if that clamping knob comes to rest perpendicular to the string lie!  I was all like, "Oh BLEEPETY BLEEP BLEEP, you BLEEPETY BLEEPER!"

I was stumped and very worried.  I searched the internet to little avail, but did discover many pictures of these tuners on standard Fender 6-in-line headstocks.  I compared my headstock to the S-500, and it looked very similar, both in tuner spacing and cross-string angle. Yes, I could put some other tuners on there, but these things were bloody expensive!  WTF?  I clamped a string into the bass tuner and discovered two things:

1. Probably, if the clamping knob is perpendicular, I can muscle it around another quarter turn to make it parallel
2. Because of the peculiar spaghetti-slurping operation of these tuners (pulling the string down into a hole), the clamping knobs wouldn't always be in the full down position - room for strings to go under them

I'm relying on point 1, because point 2 depends on it - wouldn't want to tighten a string, dragging a clamping knob down into the next highest string and bollocksing up the works. I think it'll be okay.  

The nearly-completed neck:

Next I'm going to start working on the body.  It's time to:

1. get this thing strung up and arranged properly
2. pickups in
3. frets leveled
4. intonation and setup
5. take it all back down and put it into its final shape, which means headstock shape, proper contours, body shape
6. finished all wood parts with whatever stains or coatings I decide to apply

I'm ordering the pickups in the next week or so.  The bill for that ain't gonna be pretty.  More later.