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Cutting the nut

Tonight I started working on the bit of wood at the top of the fingerboard that has grooves in it for the strings, commonly called a nut. I am using a prefabricated fingerboard however the nut I have is just a blank and needs to be shaped.

I decided to go for ebony fittings on my violin simply for their durability. I toyed with the idea of light coloured wood for a while thinking it might look nice but standard hard waring ebony eventually won me over. The fingerboard on the old violin I currently play isn't made of ebony its made of rose wood and it shows wear quite badly.

Anyway this is what I started with, fingerboard and nut blank.

The nut blank is not actually perfectly square, one side is sloped at an angle. The sloping side is supposed to have the same gradient as the bottom of the peg box. I sanded the nut to try and get the sides perfectly flat as they were a little uneven. I realised was the nut was too long compared to the width of my violin's neck. So I held it up to the violin, drew a line on the back of it in pencil, then chopped a bit off.

Next came the meticulously agonising part of marking out the slots that the strings sit in. There are very precise measurements for this which are generally the same on all well made intruments.

The bottom string and top string must be 16.5mm apart with the two middle strings both 5.5mm away from their neighbouring strings. I measured out these distances carefully on a piece of paper, then held the paper up to the nut and transferred the lines on to the nut using a soft 2B pencil.

So now I had managed to work out where I needed to cut the nut for the strings to sit but there was still one more piece of critical information I did not have, how deep to cut the slots.

Cut the slots too deep and the string will just buzz against the fingerboard. Cut it not deep enough and the distance between the string and the fingerboard will be so great it will be difficult to press the string down with one finger.

Using google I was able to find some average measurements for distance from string to fingerboard. The bottom string being 4.76mm away from the fingerboard and the top string being 3.17mm away. Great, I though, so each string slot needs cutting to a slightly different depth. I checked this distance on my old violin and it seemed very tiny compared to the "average" measurements.

At this point I decided to completely disregard the average measurements google had provided me with and adopted a trial and error approach.

I cut the first slot a little bit, then hooked the tail piece on, attached an old string, stood an old bridge underneath it and slid the unglued nut and fingerboard into position under the string. Although not fully tightened I checked the string to make sure it was not buzzing against the fingerboard. The first slot needed to be wider to accommodate the bottom string as it is the widest. So I made some adjustments then checked the nut against the violin again.

Once I had the first slot cut I continued this slow process of repeating checking and cutting over and over again.

Here's a picture of the final nut after a long evenings work.

I'm really relieved I was able to get the distances between the slots correct. I'm confident the strings are held sufficiently high enough from the fingerboard that they wont buzz. Worst case scenario if they are too high I can always make the slots deeper later.

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

hi ... I am Frets come from my islands have ebony wood fossils that might be beneficial for you as you produks material.......This material harder than the type of wood

Unknown said...

hi ... I am Frets come from my islands have ebony wood fossils that might be beneficial for you as you produks material.......This material harder than the type of wood

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