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From: Ross
Remote Name: 76.101.10.136
Date: 24 May 2007
Time: 07:37:33 -0400
Luthier’s Weblog 5/24/07 The bear or bears came again last night and took the large yellow water cooler filled with cat food which I keep outside the garage door. I’ll need to keep it inside from now on. After I find it. Aside from the initial irritation, I always feel a thrill of, well, not delight, but maybe satisfaction that there freely roams on our property a wild critter as ….other.. as a bear. Picking up a knocked over garbage can seems a small price to pay for the knowledge, and occasional sighting, of bears or wild hogs or deer or alligators. The feeling is made the sweeter by the certain knowledge that concrete daily closes in on my small island here on the west edge of the Everglades. I would occasionally see wild turkeys eight or ten years ago. But no more. I was just reading a book when I suddenly had an olfactory memory; that of the smell of a large dry old building attic, maybe municipal in nature. I don’t know where it came from, or what the building was. There is no recollection of anything like it here in South Florida, where I’ve lived for more than twenty years. Very vivid, though, and pleasant in a peculiar nostalgic way. Possibly synaptic short circuits, symptomatic of brain cells dying and not being replaced. I wouldn’t mind smelling it again. It is hard to know just where to stop when it comes to describing the minimum headstock requirement. Besides ergonomic considerations, the string anchor points (tuning machines) should be placed in such a way as to provide minimum load on the nut. This occurs in two planes. The first is vertical load, which is determined by headstock angle and tuner string post length. Then there is horizontal load, which is determined by the degree of variance from straight of the string path as it transitions from nut to tuner. The luthier must decide on the angle, if any, that the headstock cants back from the fingerboard axis. He could leave it flat, and depend on mechanical string retainers to produce downward string force on the nut. Aside from the sin of inelegance, this option introduces a new point of friction on the string which must necessarily affect tuning precision. A slight backward angle is his choice. What degree? The luthier sees no need for an angle greater than that required to provide one or two pounds of downward pressure on the nut when the string is tuned to pitch. With typical string gauges at typical tensions, this can be seven or eight degrees, given average tuner post height. Greater angles than this, which are decidedly the norm, serve no purpose other than to accelerate nut wear, increase string friction, and weaken the neck structure. In addition, the builder has learned by experience that his fingernails often suffer when adjusting nut slot depth on guitars with excessive headstock angle. He keeps a clipper and file at his workbench. Excessive horizontal load on the nut is commonly seen on pie-plate sized headstocks where the string takes a sharp left or right turn toward the tuner post from the nut. Interestingly, this side load leads to the need to increase the headstock angle, as downward load on the nut must exceed side load so as to seat the string at the bottom of the nut slot for action height control and minimization of string buzz. In other words, the straighter the string path from saddle to tuner post, the less friction inducing downward load is necessary for string control at the nut. This is a GOOD THING. My builder has long admired the Fender 6-in-line headstock for the absence of nut side load. He chooses, however, to use a 3-on-a-side approach, placing the outside ‘e’ tuners as close to on-axis as he can, and narrowing the headstock toward it’s top in order to minimize string path deviation of a side to side nature. The result is a compact headstock with no wide open areas that cry out for ornamentation. Ross Teigen 8:31 am