I've found myself in the market for a carved nut. On my travels I stumbled upon a local luthier's web page advocating for the use of Brazilian Bloodwood for guitar nuts. Has anyone seen or heard of such a thing before?
If one could make a nut out of timber, why would guitar manufacturers not just use the end of the fretboard?
"Bloodwood is extremely dense, and has a pronounced blunting effect on cutters. The wood tends to be brittle and can splinter easily while being worked. Those persistent enough to bear with the difficulties of working with Bloodwood to the finishing stage are rewarded with an exceptional and lustrous red surface." - The Wood Database.
The picture shows a classical guitar, and nylon strings have far less tension than steel strings. So whilst a hard wood may be fine for classical style guitar nuts, it may not be hard enough for steel strings (though it may well be). I really don't know how hard some wood is compared to bone or plastic, but some are hard enough to wear out metal tools fairly quickly. Whilst you might make a small component like a nut out of a very hard wood, it would be too much of an effort to make a fingerboard out of it. Also, to use the end of the fretboard as a nut, the fretboard blank has to be a lot thicker in order for the nut part to have sufficient height, which means using much thicker blanks (at greater cost) and then removing a lot of excess wood, just to have a lip at one end. It makes far more sense to have the nut separate. Also, if you cut a slot too low, then you don't have to fit a whole new fretboard!
I also doubt, being a very hard wood with little give, that it would accept frets that easily. Given bloodwood's propensity to splinter, using a softer wood like rosewood or ebony makes more sense. You may otherwise end up making ten fretboards to get one board without defects.
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