Westone Nut Done

Happy New Year, blog-readers (bloggees? blog-ites?). I've made a little progress with the Westone since my last post, mainly with the installation of the nut. It needed quite a bit of sanding in order to fit, partly since it was inevitably too high, but also because the slot between the end of the fretboard and the truss rod cover is somewhat narrower than the base of the nut was pre-sanding. This meant I needed to sand a little off the back of the nut in order that it would fit snugly into the slot, as you can see from this photo.

Once I had it sanded down a bit I put a couple of strings on in order to check the height, and sand it down little by little until I had it at the correct height. According to the excellent book "Make Your Own Electric Guitar" by Melvyn Hiscock (a mine of useful information) the correct height is when the string just clears the first fret when fretted at the third. I think I've got this right, if not I might be in trouble later!

Then I removed the strings, and glued the nut in place with a couple of small dabs of glue - taking care not to get any into the truss rod channel or on the truss rod cover itself. I'm not going to worry about doing any more of the setup yet, that can wait until after the electrics are done.

I've also cleaned up the bridge and machine heads, since they were covered in what looked like a good few years worth of grime.

Lastly for today, if I were to make a New Year's resolution this year, it'd be to find more time to work on these projects - and to update this blog! So hopefully you'll hear from me a little more regularly this year...beginning with a couple of posts in the next few days about the other progress I've made in the last couple of months.