Plastic Strat Nuts - Why, Fender, why?

[Katastrophe]

Plastic Strat nuts officially suck. I was putting in some practice time for the country band last night (about 2 hours, the most I've had in a LONG time), and noticed that my G string has worn down in the nut slot almost to the fretboard. The guitar is a year old or so. I guess I'm doing too many bends, trying to approximate a steel guitar.:

By contrast, my ESP was built in 1994 and has the same problem, but it took over 10 years to develop with the graphite nut. I guess I got spoiled with my other Floyd equipped guitars, as they have the metal locking nut.

I also noticed considerable fret wear as well... Does Fender use a softer compound for their frets? There's still plenty of material there to do a recrown, but I didn't think I'd have to do it so soon.

Anyway, now that I have two guitars to fix, I guess I'll do a search here for the repair, since I've never replaced a nut before and don't want to screw it up.

Any extra hints and advice would be appreciated!

[Guitar Gal]

Kat,

Try here for some info on nut replacement: http://www.fretnotguitarrepair.com/nuts.htm



GG

[marnold***]

I can understand why they do that with Squiers but I've never understood why they do that with Fender-branded guitars, especially trem-equipped ones. That's my favorite part of the Speedloader on my Floyd: all metal nut. Will never ever wear out or bind a string. My Showmaster thankfully came with a graphite nut.

That's one thing that impressed me about the Agile AL-3000s I was looking at. All of them come with a Tusq nut AND a graphite one in case you prefer that. Why Agile can do that and not Fender is beyond me.

[just strum]

Same issue with Washburn on their acoustic (not sure about the electric). We (the Washburn forum) could never figure out why they didn't spend a little extra and put better nuts and saddles on their acoustic.

They recently started doing it with some of the midrange, but I'm not sure what percent of the models get the upgrade. I think it's an inexpensive upgrade that is a good selling point.

[Jipes***]

Unfortunately the quality of the parts on Fender guitars are really not up to the standard of a great guitar company, the saddles are also of bad quality and ruining strings (I had to change them on my 57 reissue) and the pots are also of cheap quality :

Hopefully the guitars are not only the parts but it's sad when you have to exchange so many things on a quite expensive guitar !

Jipes

[mrmudcat]

Unfortunately the quality of the parts on Fender guitars are really not up to the standard of a great guitar company, the saddles are also of bad quality and ruining strings (I had to change them on my 57 reissue) and the pots are also of cheap quality :

Hopefully the guitars are not only the parts but it's sad when you have to exchange so many things on a quite expensive guitar !

Jipes

I disagree with this and frankly find it misleading.Not sure what models your talking about but saddles are stamped steel on american standards.Lots of reasons you break strings at the saddle .Two main ones are a burr or something abrasive on the saddle itself and the break angle being to severe thus breaking strings! Pots are cts and are american made standard on lots of top guitars made .Both mim and american use these pots along with gibson etc. etc.:

So yea I respectively disagree!

[Jipes***]

I disagree with this and frankly find it misleading.Not sure what models your talking about but saddles are stamped steel on american standards.Lots of reasons you break strings at the saddle .Two main ones are a burr or something abrasive on the saddle itself and the break angle being to severe thus breaking strings! Pots are cts and are american made standard on lots of top guitars made .Both mim and american use these pots along with gibson etc. etc.:

So yea I respectively disagree!

Don't want to start a friendly fight but my guitar tech strongly disagree with you, all the pots are of moderate quality compared to many other and yes the saddles are often not well polished so that strings break down. That happen to me on my Esquire several time as well as on my 57 Reissue american Strat. I had to change some of them in order to circumvent this problem

Maybe I'm just not lucky but the guy which is fixing my guitars is a skill repairman and a professional musician, I do believe what he says (he is not the first one to tell me that BTW)

[Tone2TheBone]

We're with ya buddy. Grab a nut of your choice but not too hard and then go buy a synthetic bone or brass nut and install that baby. Careful with the exacto blade breaking the cheap *** plastic nut glue break on your Fender and don't hammer that puppy out too hard it only takes a tap or two.

It's easy to do brother you can do it.

[Katastrophe]

We're with ya buddy. Grab a nut of your choice but not too hard and then go buy a synthetic bone or brass nut and install that baby.

Now that's just funny, I don't care who ya are!

So, I'm gonna give this a try.

Which material should I use, graphite, brass or bone? Should I go to something like an LSR roller nut? That requires more neck surgery and I'd probably take it to a luthier for the install, if I go that route.

[mrmudcat]

Replace with a graphtech nut!! Awesome performance to price ratio.

[Tone2TheBone]

Kata - The graphtech nuts are great. I've also had great luck with the Tusq pre-slotted synthetic bone nuts. I've installed 3 of them on my Fenders and they're such an improvement. Easy to do.

[Iago]

On all guitars I had, I've only had a single broken string due to a saddle. 7 years of playing = 5 years on a strat + 2 years on a tele and mustang. Since 2002 using 010s and I take no less then a month to change strings. Just a case of personal touch I think. Can't understand the plastic nuts too. I would really like better jacks also! The Mustang's is starting to give trouble, and the tele's is constantly getting loose. If I move the guitar around in a certain way when playing, I can get a really loud pop sometimes. Can't complain about the rest, but thats' enough to really piss me off sometimes.

[Bloozcat]

Most guitar manufacturers who use what's considered to be good quality parts, use CTS pots (Fender and Gibson), CGE pots (Gibson), and maybe Alpha pots. For switches and jacks, most use Switchcraft and/or CRL.

The CTS pots are normally just the stock pots that have a +/- 20% variance. I've never really seen a problem in the build quality of these, but if you get a pot(s) that are at the bottom end of that 20% (200k), it'll have a definite adverse affect on the tone of the guitar.

A company could certainly spec a better CTS pot +/- 10% if they wanted to, but that runs up the cost of the guitar. Or they could have pots made to their specs for an even greater cost to the consumer. Companies like RS Guitar Works who do this, provide custom parts for a price. People seem perfectly willing to shell out the money for replacement parts like this after buying the guitar, but complain if the cost of the guitar reflects the use of these parts in the original construction.

As it's always been, it's the luck of the draw in which parts are in the guitar you buy. That's why playing before you buy is important. Remember that even the guitars from the golden age (30-40 years ago), had their fair share of turkeys that didn't sound very good. We tend to only remember the great ones from that era.

[Jipes***]

Bloozcat thanks a lot for this very detailled explanation and great insights on guitar pots :

[Bloozcat]

Bloozcat thanks a lot for this very detailled explanation and great insights on guitar pots :

De rien, mon ami...or... Bitte schon, mein Freund, (if you prefer).

The next time you're out at your favorite drinking establishment Jipes, how about having a nice stein of Kronenbourg for me. It's my favorite beer, and darn hard to find locally here...:

[Jipes***]

De rien, mon ami...or... Bitte schon, mein Freund, (if you prefer).

The next time you're out at your favorite drinking establishment Jipes, how about having a nice stein of Kronenbourg for me. It's my favorite beer, and darn hard to find locally here...:

To be honest we don't have any real good local beer, the original one from Alsace have close down. Kronenbourg is the very last one I will surely have a drink thinking of you !

[Plank_Spanker]

As it's always been, it's the luck of the draw in which parts are in the guitar you buy. That's why playing before you buy is important. Remember that even the guitars from the golden age (30-40 years ago), had their fair share of turkeys that didn't sound very good. We tend to only remember the great ones from that era.

For sooth......................................

The True Word has been spoken! :

[Danzego]

To oldguy: Dude, don't let my experience freak you out. It hasn't freaked ME out. That first MIM was just the tool marks that was the problem. Other than that, I thought it was sweet.

The Am Std. is also very nice and was set up perfectly (or, if anything, the action was a hair lower than I would like) as far as I can tell. It's just that weird issue with what must be the nut allowing the strings to vibrate at the headstock to the point where they're sounding when playing an open B or G and giving a slight but noticeable ring (a metallic sound). But I'm not letting that one little issue steer me from any other Fenders. I'll just make sure I get one that works!

Go try a few out and see what you think. Just remember, Fenders are generally strung like crap (at least in my limited experience), so don't expect them to stay in tune very well without changing strings and, well, I too find their setups to be very inconsistent. But then I'm sure unless you get the one in a hundred that just happens to be setup in your fashion, you're going to change it anyway.