The Hub

Hi everyone - I recently ran into trouble making new nut for one of my necks that needed to be trued and re-fretted. I roughed in the nut as usual and then, with the bass guitar fully assembled and strung up, I started cutting the slots to depth. I use the StewMac digital nut slot depth gauge and have had good results in the past.

I marked the nut's lowest points (radiused) using the guitar nut scribe tool (first time using this!) and compared this line to that drawn with my half-height flat pencil -- both lines were properly located.

I cut the slots to between 0.020" - 0.022" depth, being careful to not go below the pencil line, and continued to finish up the nut. However, with the bass fully assembled and at tension, the resulting string heights at Fret #1 were between 0.010" and 0.011" -- roughly half the expected height. (ugh!).

The only difference in my process that I can ascribe to this error is that I had the bridge saddles up too high and did not realize this. However, I cannot understand how saddle height would so greatly influence the nut slot gauge read-out like this.

Where am I going wrong? Any help is appreciated.

Thanks! Dom

PS: The only upside to my error is that because the neck was properly flattened and the frets were all correctly leveled, the lower-than-normal action actually played smoothly and with no buzz anywhere along the neck. But a light touch is needed, otherwise all bets are off for buzzing.