Well after months of not knowing whether I was wasting my time or not I finally got to hear her. And I am so relieved that she works. Tuning was somewhat of a problem, as she wouldn’t play in tune anywhere on the fretboard. As it was a PBG neck I knew that wasn’t the problem, so it had to be the nut and/or bridge saddle.
I had already cut the bone nut fairly low, but tuning problems over the first few frets is usually nut related so I got into that and lowered the slots by about 1mm but it made all the difference.
Next, intonation, and (a first for me) to compensate the bone saddle. The original position of the bridge was spot on (phew) as the “e” and “G” strings intonated perfectly, but the others were out by anything up to about 10+ cents.
I then began the painstaking process of filing a bit away from the nut, bring the string up to tension, check intonation, loosen the string, file a bit more off the saddle, re-tension, check intonation, loos………. Well you get the idea. This is done with each string. With the amount of times I have loosened and re-tensioned the strings while cutting the nut and saddle it’s a wonder that the strings have any tone left in them.
But I finally finished and intonation is good to within 2 or 3 cents at the 12th fret measured on an iPhone App. Its not perfect but as acoustics are mainly played below the 7th fret its as good as I could get it. Bottom line is I am REALLY happy how she turned out. I can always cut a new saddle at a later date if I end up not happy with it.
I used my 12” radius block to rough out the shape of the saddle
Then strung up the guitar and worked on each string until I was happy with the intonation. For a noob like me this was pretty time consuming, as I had to "sneak up" on the scale length for fear of filing away too much.
Once I was happy with the intonation I removed the saddle again and finished up shaping the saddle in my hobby vice.
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