Under the relentless pull of the medium strings tuned to concert pitch, this 3 year old "Gibson Songwriter" had reached the point where the amount of pressure that was needed to bring the string into contact with the fret, made it a real challenge to play. As I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog; even if you have the brute force to play the guitar with action like this; your efforts are futile. When the action is this high , the notes will get "progressively sharper" as you ascend the fingerboard, making it impossible to regulate the intonation.
The upper frets at the neck-to-body-junction needed to be levelled, recrowned and polished in order to allow the action to be lowered without incurring any buzzing or "splatting out" notes in the upper register of the fretboard.
The split parallelogram inlays were masked off for the fret dress and polishing.
Upper frets after work was completed.
Careful removal of the nut, in preparation for the new Tusq compensated nut.
Tusq blank, stage one.
Tusq nut stage two.
Finished compensated nut.
With the bridge saddle now lowered and compensated,
fret dress complete,
and compensated nut installed;
the instrument now plays smoothly
( .013" - .056" strings at concert pitch )
and perfectly in tune across the entire register.
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