Not sure if this is the most appropriate section for this thread, but anyway, I was doing some work on my Gibson USA Les Paul Studio guitar last night, basically re-installing a brass nut on it, now although the brass nut itself is thick enough to fit in the nut shelf, but, I found that the nut shelf was cut a bit too deep for the brass nut to sit so that the 1st-fret action was high enough to allow the strings to ring cleanly without buzzing against the first fret, so I did some thinking and decided to try making a shim out of some rosewood that a local Darwin Luthier gave me, the last time I tried installing the brass nut I used some pieces of clear plastic to make a shim, but I ended up gluing the nut in at a funny angle relative to the surface of the fretboard so that it wasn't at 90 degrees to it, this played havoc with the individual string-intonation.
After roughly cutting the new rosewood shim to size, I used some 80-grit sandpaper and a vernier caliper with a digital readout to carefully sand the rosewood shim down to the correct thickness to allow the nut to sit in the nut shelf to get the 1st-fret action correct, as it turned out the rosewood shim needed to be sanded down to a thickness of 1.2 mm, after that I glued the new rosewood shim to the bottom of the nut shelf using some Aquadhere PVA wood glue, I think I had a win cause the nut looks like it is sitting square relative to the surface of the fretboard, anyway, I'm happy with it, I left it to dry overnight last night, and I'm going to be gluing the nut into position today, just need to pop up to the service station to buy some suitable glue, PVA glue isn't strong enough to glue the nut into position because it won't bond to brass, so I was thinking of going with either Superglue or some 2-part Epoxy.
I might go with the two-part epoxy since Superglue dries fast and I want to make sure I have time to get the brass nut positioned correctly before the glue dries, otherwise I'll have to remove the nut and re-do everything again.
Last edited by DrNomis_44; 04-02-2017 at 09:08 AM.
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