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Assembling the guitar
After you had to wait and be patient for so long, the time has finally come to test-fit the individual components of your guitar. Reward yourself now and assemble the guitar provisionally; by doing so you might find out about mistakes you may have made, mistakes that at this stage are still fairly easy to correct. Wiring (for details see the following pages) and testing the electronic components should also be part of test-fitting.
Careful readers may have noticed that the guitar shown above was already assembled at a much earlier stage than we have meanwhile arrived at in this book. After finishing, the guitar will have to be put to one side and should not be touched for some time. So if you just can't wait and are desparate to play your guitar, do it now, but not before you haven't first washed your hands properly. Traces of grease and dirt on the wood are very difficult to remove.
Mounting the hardware
For mounting all tuners on one side of the peghead (“6-in-line”) a rule will help to get an evenly-spaced layout (1). Pre-drilling the holes for the small mounting screws is an absolute must. Use adhesive tape on the drill bit as a depth stop to prevent drilling through the peghead. Most tuners are screwed on from above.
Mark the correct nut height by placing a pencil cut in half along its length (3) or a knife blade (4) flat on the frets (if you haven't bought a finished nut, that is, of course). Halving the pencil is best done on a belt sander. To make a knife mark more clearly visible on a light-colored nut blacken the nut with, for instance, a pencil before making the mark. Radiused fingerboards require an accordingly-shaped nut. For this a belt sander is best used, but a file will also do. Bone nuts produce a distinctive smell which will probably remind you of your last dentist's appointment. File or sand the nut down to about 1mm above the marked line and round off the top edge of the nut on the peghead-side.
Mount the pickups with screws and springs either on the pickguard (5) or directly on the body (6). Fitting the electronic parts is definitely a lot easier if you use a pickguard as this allows fitting and removing all parts (including the pickups) from above and as a compact unit. Pickups are always mounted with springs to create the counter-pressure needed for pickup height adjustment (7).
Humbucking pickups are always screwed onto a mounting ring which is then screwed onto the body (8,9,10). The spring makes it easier to raise or lower the pickups by means of screws. Such mounting rings, which are oddly enough called rings although they are rectangular in shape, come in various heights and with flat or round bottom. Use the four holes in the corners for screwing the mounting ring to the body, and the two holes in the center of the narrow side of the mounting ring for screwing the humbucker to the ring. Fasten the humbucker with two long screws and two springs to make it adjustable for height. Schaller pickups are fastened with two screws on either side, eliminating any possibility of tilting the pickup (- another example of German thoroughness). The special Schaller mounting rings have three holes on their two narrow sides to make it possible to mount any humbucking pickup. As with all screwholes that are drilled into the body pre-drilling is required (11).
Correct stringing of the guitar helps to keep it in tune. See the section on set-up for details. Don't clip the strings for test-fitting; instead, leave them longer and wind them around the tuner shafts several times. When fitted a second time the thin strings often break right at the point at which they are bent at the tuner shaft hole. If this happens you will still be able to use the string, provided you have wound enough of it as a reserve around the tuner shaft. Pass each string through its respective hole in the bridge and then pull it as far as the ball-end permits. Then bend about 10mm (1/2") of the string end at a right angle towards the tuner knob and put this 10mm (1/2")-part of the string into the tuner shaft hole. Next turn the tuner knob away from the body while still tensioning the string with the other hand until the tuner shaft takes over. When the string is lightly stretched, put it on its saddle before tensioning it further.
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Nut files
It is advisable to use expensive special nut files. Grobet (4) in Switzerland and Ibanez in Japan are manufacturers of such files, which are available from most suppliers of instrument-building tools.These special nut files have teeth only at their edges and produce accurate, round-bottomed nut slots.
Stewart Macdonald's double-ege nut files (5) cut on the edges only, and taper from a thickened center to a different thickness on each cutting edge. They produce a v- shaped slot with a round bottom.
You don't have to buy all file sizes for making slots of different widths: wider slots can also be formed by simply rolling a file side-to-side.
The thinnest nut files available are as thin as sawblades and therefore very fragile.The following four file sizes would make a good basic starter set: .016"/ .025"/ .032"/ .042" (0.4 / 0.6 / 0.8 / 1mm). It is also possible to cut out the slots with a saw first and continue with a nut file.
Accurately filed nut slots are essential for guiding the strings and ensuring clean intonation. Start stringing the guitar with the two outer strings and cut small grooves into the nut, just big enough to hold the strings in position (1). Remember that we designed the guitar with the two outer nut slots at least 3.5mm from the ends of the nut. Then place the other four strings at even distances between those two outer strings. Stretch the strings lightly, holding them in position with your fingers. When you look at the strings you should have the impression that they are spaced out evenly - mathematical precision is less important than the optical impression. This means that the thinner strings have to be placed slightly closer to each other and that the space between strings should gradually increase towards the bass strings. Spreading out the strings in this way may be a detail but will definitely have a positive effect on the playability of the neck. When the correct string positions have been found, mark the position of both sides of each string with a very fine pencil or a knife (2).
Nut slots should be made so that the strings seat nicely in them; they should be round-bottomed and not deeper than half the string diameter. The slots can be formed with round files of equal diameter as the strings (3) or, better still, with special nut files (4,5). With the tapered shape of a small needle file you will have all the diameters needed for making the three bass string slots of a bass guitar. Hold the file at a slight angle (so that it is higher over the fingerboard) to get a good front edge of the nut for the strings to be bent at. To prevent the strings from getting stuck during tuning it is a good idea to make the slots increasingly wider towards the peghead-side of the nut and to leave them just wide enough for the strings to fit in at the front edge of the nut.
When you move a string left or right or press it down, its bending point must never be in the slot but exactly on the front edge of the slot. Poorly-made nut slots will produce unpleasant rattling noises which can easily be mistaken for fret buzzes. So before you blame your fretwork, check the nut slots first as they might well be the source of the problem.