I didn’t know that strings made that much of a difference. Being a real cheapskate I never change my strings as often as I should.
I would guess that I have tensioned and loosened the D’Addarios more than a dozen times whilst cutting the nut and shaping the saddle. It always takes me quite a few goes to get the nut right and as it was my first attempt at making a compensated bone saddle a lot of trial and error was involved.
I can remember that I was pretty chuffed when I tensioned up the strings for the first time on the un-compensated saddle as the e and D strings were pretty spot on, intonation wise. Seeing as I’m using standard electric strings (with 3 unwound strings) the e and D are the shortest and need the least compensation. Now even these strings cannot be intonated properly and I just assumed that I had screwed up somewhere.
I will definitely put on a new set of strings before I do anything else and see if that makes a difference. You might have just saved me a load of heart-ache.
Thanks Phil, Simon and everybody else for all the help and encouragement.