I’m often asked what’s the best way to improve an average guitar?  The first thing to consider is do you want to improve the sound it makes or the way it feels to play?  The first is easy, strip out the pickups and fit something special, Bare Knuckle are probably my favourite, and their choices are very wide.  At the same time replace the pots’ capacitors and switch for better quality.  If you have average pickups top quality electrics won’t improve them but if you have top end pickups cheap electrics will take the edge off the sound.

The second option how do you improve the feel and playability is a little more time-consuming, read on to see what can be done…

Firstly, how even are the fret heights?  if some are higher than others you can never get a nice setup without fret buzzing or worse notes choking out in places.

These ones are pretty bad and the only way to cure that is to dress them all.

Replacing the nut wont necessarily make the playing any easier but it will improve the sustain.  It has to come out to dress the frets anyway so I might as well replace it with a bone one. 

Before leveling the fret tops it’s vital to make sure the neck is completely flat..

A small turn on the truss rod.  There was actually no tension in it which is why the neck had too much set in it.

Tape it up to protect the fret board and body…

and with the level beam start to grind the high points…

You can see which frets were higher than the rest already…

Once the beam is touching everywhere the tops must therefore be level!

Now I need to re-shape the tops, to round them off again.

It’s this stage that takes the time, this is about half way through the first fret…

and done, just 21 more to go….

Once the shape is right each fret needs to be polished with 4 stages of micro-mesh to bring back the shine.

With the frets done a quick clean and re-oil of the fretboard.

And now for that new nut.  The blank is roughly the right size but still needs some work.

First to get a flat and square bottom and side.

Then get it to the correct thickness..

Square off the ends at the right length.

re-shape the back edge and one nut ready to fit.

Just needs the slots cutting into the top, making sure the spacing is correct.  It would be easy to copy the spacings from the old one but they weren’t even from new!

With the strings back on all I need to do now is a standard setup, starting with the neck set.

Just a little more tension in the truss rod needed.

Since the nut is new I’ll need to cut each slot down to the right depth to give a nice action height at the 1st fret.  The original action was way too high.

 With that done it’s easy to set the action height (measured at the 12th fret) by raising or lowering the bridge.

Since everything else has been moved there is no guarantee that the intonation (the position of the bridge up and down the string) is still right, it might not have been anyway so I’ll check that.

Lastly the pickup heights.  The bridge pickup was way too low, although setting them to a standard height is only ever a starting point.  The final setup has to be done by ear.

And there we go.  A quick polish and better than new…..