ST-1 set up

[Mmack089]

Hi, I’ve recently completed the building aspect of my strat, I’m at the point of setting up the guitar. I’ve watched a couple of the videos on adjusting the bridge saddles and intonation.

With the current set up on the guitar, the action seems good around the 12 fret and beyond, the action on the first 5 frets seems a little high, but also has a little bit of buzzing on certain frets. So I thought of lowering the action a bit (my bridge saddles are high) so it’s lower at the first few frets, but wouldn’t it cause it to buzz more?

In terms of doing a full set up, is there a certain order in doing the adjustments?

Thanks

[Sonic Mountain]

The way I do it is:

Neck relief/truss rod adjustment -checked with notched straight edge.

Check for raised/loose frets and tap them home.

Light level and dress. Marking the frets with texta and using a radius block on ~600grit will give you a good idea if there are any high or low points.

Set action to ~1.5mm at the 12th fret.

Intonation.

Then I play it for a bit, and tweak the action till there's no buzz.

Over the course of a week or so I'll keep rechecking relief as the guitar settles in with string tension on it.

After I'm sure it's holding adjustment I'll do a final set of the action and intonation. It's at this point I will start fine tuning the nut. Quite often on the kits it's too tall. You can file the bottom a bit to bring the overall height down (and sometimes I do this right away if it's ridiculously high) but you do need to lower each slot individually to suit the string. I normally use a feeler gauge and try and get it down to a little less than .5 off a mm off the 1st fret. Like the rest of it, I find it best to creep up on it in small increments.

When I'm happy with the nut, I'll re-check and fine tune the action and intonation again.

Generally speaking, depending on how much I'm playing, it usually takes a bit over a week to get it really spot on on a freshly built guitar. Once it's seasoned I only every really check it again during string changes or if its playing up.