Mandatory "Sorry if this has been asked before/posted before" but there's a whole lot of posts up here =P
Finally got around to starting my build. Its an EX-7 String.
Sanded down the pieces a bit and then glued the neck to the body. Installed the tune-o-matic and tuning pegs to get to work on the intonation/action/etc. Gonna do the p'up install after this.
My issue is that there were no string trees in the box and was wondering if i'm after doing something wrong. My high-e is waaaay off and doesnt sit in the nut at all (I can can file that down later on if needed, no worries).
I've gone off and gotten some string trees from a local shop, but decided to post here in case someone can tell me that its a bad idea before i screw one in for my high b and e strings.
If anyone's built one of these 7's before, i'd love to know if you guys experienced this as well. Or if anyone with more experience (So... anyone) has had a run in like this before, i'd appreciate your help =)
Hi and welcome. Hoped to finish an EX-1 today, but a sand through means some more respraying (grrr). But the EX-7 isn't that different. String trees are there to pull the strings down for decent break angle over the nut on headstocks that run parallel to the fretboard, like on Fenders. But the EX-7 headstock is angled back, so that shouldn't be an issue and you shouldn't need any string trees.
If the angle of the top E string relative to the nut slot is such that the sideways pull is tugging it out of a shallow slot, then the answer is to cut the nut slot deeper. A standard T-shape string tree won't help much as whilst you can get the string pull straighter, the string angle at the string tree will give you lots of tuning problems. Proper nut files are very expensive, but the cheap welding nozzle cleaning files that are common on eBay and Amazon and sold as nut files will do for deepening the slots on a couple a couple of nuts (though you'll need to measure the diameter of each file to make sure you get the right width).
If the break angle is too shallow, then you could try more wraps around the tuner posts to move the leaving point of the string down.
If it's something else, then post some pics. Pics need to be resized to be no bigger than 1500 pixels on any side and less than 1MB in size for the site to host them, otherwise host elsewhere and link.
After your message, I did notice that the nut slots were very shallow towards the high end compared to the lower side! I'll take your advice and run with it, my friend.
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