Nut slot too low? The baking soda and superglue trick can really get you out of a hole pretty quickly. It’s best as a temporary repair but can sometimes work longer term too.
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Paper or cardboard is usually a terrible, tone-sucking material to use as a shim. Unless you learn this one cool trick that Big Nut doesn’t want you to know. You won’t believe what happens next! 😉
Nah, seriously… It’s good.
Read MoreA nut with a low slot (or slots) is a pain. It buzzes when you play the open string and sounds generally awful. You could replace it with a nice new nut but, sometimes you’re in a hurry or on a budget.
Enter the shim…
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WE’ve looked a some methods to remove a worn or broken screw. These have mostly involved gripping the screw in some way to try unscrew it from the guitar. But what if there’s just no way to grip the screw? What’s the thing we leave until the very end to try?
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If there’s just no grip left on the screw, it might be necessary to drill out its head in order to remove whatever it’s holding in place (a pickguard or tuner for instance). Learn how to drill worn or stripped screw heads for removal.
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Screws can get worn, corroded, and crammed with crud over the years. Removal can become challenging. Here’s the first in a series of posts with tips for removing stubborn screws.
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Answering questions about the clever fix made to address limitations around replacing the zero fret on Brian May’s famous Red Special guitar. Great thinking…
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A while back, I wrote about some methods for enlarging holes — for instance, if you wanted to fit larger tuners or a larger control pot into a hole that had housed something smaller.
But what if you want to go the other way? What if you want to remove some hardware that’s bigger than the stuff being installed?
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Guitar and bass neck sometimes get ski jump deformations. Turns out it’s important how you define your ski jump. Avoid confusion and check this out…
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While not completely irrefutable yet, I find the correlation of poor shimming practice and ski jump deformations in instrument necks to be compelling. I strongly recommend using a full-pocket (wedge-shaped) shim if you ever need to shim your bolt-on guitar or bass.
Please read my reasoning…
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Sooner or later you’ll have to make a small hole bigger to accommodate some new piece of hardware — tuners are a common one. You can’t just hack at it with a drill bit so find out how to safely make holes bigger.
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So, after publishing the advice to always tune UP to a note for stability, I had a lot of questions about some advice from Fender saying the opposite when using locking tuners. Should you always tune up or should you sometimes go past the note and tune down?
Where’s my Debunking Hat?
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