The original nut was a broken creamy-coloured plastic item that didn't inspire much confidence. The garage was invaded to see what was about and eventually I chanced upon an old PentiumII heatsink assembly. This was an old one - before they decided that everything gets a fan. The heatsink assembly consisted of a flat aluminium transfer plate and a separate finned thing. The black anodised transfer plate was 3mm thick and appeared to be a harder grade of aluminium than the regular stuff that often crops up. An original fixing hole would provide acces to the truss rod - great!
The aluminium was sawn and filed into shape whilst being protected from the vice jaws by small pieces of card. I marked out the centres of the slots and made them 3/8" apart. Once the corners were rounded off slightly, the nut was able to be used as a guide for the chiselling that was required on the wooden nut-holder!
Chiselling the neck was done as carefully as possible to avoid messing up the impressive paint job. I don't like the idea of just gluing a nut on without some decent foundations. When a note is fretted it probably makes virtually no difference, but for an open string it must have an effect.
Time to inspect the gluing of the middle section before the top layer is put on. It is looking pretty rough, but the revised pickup shape looks much more circular.
Here is the nut in place on the neck. It needs a bit of a tidy up round the edges, but nothing major. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that the string grooves don't look equally spaced, and that maybe I should have used a fixed distance between the strings instead of their centres. In other words the string separation should be further for the fatter E string. Smeg! I might have to whittle the grooves a bit somewhen.
The neck to body joint will be the next thing to tackle...
