What's a reasonable setup goal?

Intonation, Compensation, Frustration
Mal-2
Posts: 104
Joined: Wed Jan 03, 2018 12:56 am

Re: What's a reasonable setup goal?

Post by Mal-2 »

I've had a chance to heat and press on the neck again, and the action went up considerably overall so it actually did work. However, the relief at the 8th fret when holding the low E to the 1st and 16th frets is still .008". Needless to say, I lowered the action.

Current action at the 17th fret:
E: .078" (5/64)
A: .072"
D: .067"
G: .0625" (4/64)
B: .0625"
E: .0625"

Bends are no longer zinging in general, but I evidently still have a high 19th fret to deal with. The action feels really nice overall. Now I have to hope it stays this way the next time the weather changes. Also, it doesn't want to stay in tune when I bend a lot, and I attribute this to the tuners because they generally feel insecure anyhow. I have replacements on the way.

The neck and middle pickups are .125" below the two E strings when they are fretted at the 21st (last) fret. They don't have individual pole pieces, so no further adjustment is possible.

First fret action is .012"±.001".
Mal-2
Posts: 104
Joined: Wed Jan 03, 2018 12:56 am

Re: What's a reasonable setup goal?

Post by Mal-2 »

tippie53 wrote:To me .015 is too high.
I swapped out the strings, and the wound strings have increased gauge from 42-32?-24? to 46-36-26. (The plain strings have not been swapped out, but they should be the same as what's on there now.) As a result, the neck relief (at the 7th fret now, I've been using whichever has the most clearance between 7th and 8th) increased to .015". I finally had to engage the truss rod (more than I expected), which I don't see as a bad thing. It gives me somewhere to go if need be, whereas before I was pretty much living right on the edge. Not surprisingly, I also had to increase the spring tension on the bridge quite a bit to keep it from floating.

After truss rod adjustment, the relief is now at .012" which is where I'm going to leave it. I think .008" was a shade too flat, which let the low E buzz when I really dug in hard (like Pete Townshend windmill strums). It looks like the neck prefers 9-46 over 9-42, which I don't mind at all. I wanted a bit beefier wound strings because Drop D with a .042 is a bit on the floppy side, but the tension seems quite reasonable when tuned to E as well.

Thanks for the advice on target measurements, which is why I continue to detail what I currently have. I figure the more people sanity-check my measurements, the better. I restored the action to the same heights as before: 4/64 on the plain strings, 5/64 on the low E, and the other two tapering between those two points.
Mal-2
Posts: 104
Joined: Wed Jan 03, 2018 12:56 am

Re: What's a reasonable setup goal?

Post by Mal-2 »

I went back and checked the truss rod adjustment today, since the weather has changed and it needs time to settle in after an adjustment as large as I performed. I found that the neck was, once again, too flat. The relief was somewhat less than .008" (I didn't bother getting an exact number, too flat is too flat) so I had to back off the truss rod. Along the way, I noticed that the high E was sitting much closer to the first fret than I thought was sane, so I checked that as well. I couldn't get a .008" feeler under it, let alone the .012" I had set it at. I checked the others, and ALL of them were too low. It looks like the nut was slowly sinking into the slot.

I ordered two bone nuts, since I was finding graphite to be a bit too bright on the open strings anyhow, but in the meantime I resorted to putting ghetto epoxy (superglue and baking soda) on the underside of the graphite nut to raise it, then cut the slots back down to .015". This leaves it a little sharp at the first fret, but I didn't want to have the same thing repeat itself. If it's stable in a few days, then I'll take it back down to .012" where it plays most in tune. In the meantime, I'll just have to tolerate that chords sound out of tune unless they are full barre chords.

(My test for first fret tuning is to run I-vi-ii-V7 progressions in C, G, D, A, and E. If any chord jangles, yet the open strings are in tune, then it's wrong no matter what the tuner says. I don't go through all twelve keys because full barre chords being in tune proves nothing about the nut.)

I can only guess that either the wood at the bottom of the slot was not fully broken in, and thus compressed over time, or that the slot itself had been pinching the nut enough that it didn't bottom out. Either way, replacement is the only proper fix.
Mal-2
Posts: 104
Joined: Wed Jan 03, 2018 12:56 am

Re: What's a reasonable setup goal?

Post by Mal-2 »

I have done more work at the nut slot, enlarging it in the direction of the first fret because anything even close to recommended string height at the first fret makes fretted notes way sharp. Can you believe the Fender spec for a Strat is 1/64" at the high E first fret, and 2/64" at the low E, with a smooth ramp in between? In decimal, that's .016 (pretty reasonable), then .019, .022, .025, .028, and .031". There is no way "cowboy chords" are going to be in tune with a first fret action that high unless the nut comes another half millimeter or so toward the first fret. I'm going to ignore the spec here, and go with .016" all the way across. Any fretted string is considerably closer to the next fret than that, why should the "zero fret" have to be immensely higher? (Dave's World of Fun Stuff uses .018" all the way across. And if I'm wrong, nuts are cheap.)

The bottom of the slot was also nowhere near flat, so any nut I would put in that slot would want to rock front to back and be sitting on very little support. My fix for that was to cut a strip off an old credit card that fit in the slot, and then shape the underside of this strip to match the curve underneath it. This I glued down with superglue, and then clamped it by putting the graphite nut (the thicker of the two I have on hand) back in and giving it string tension. The graphite nut wasn't sitting up straight, so I worked quickly and tapped it gently, using the handle of an X-Acto knife with the blade removed to deliver the force. This got it straightened out before the glue set up, and the string tension kept it there.

Once the bone nuts (I ordered two) show up, I'll probably end up using them both: one as the nut itself, and the other to perform this kind of compensation. However, with the first fret action ridiculously low (it's about the same as the clearance to the second fret when fretted at the first fret, so between .007 and .012" all around) it just about plays all the cowboy chords in tune (if the tuning is spot on -- it punishes the slightest drift harshly). Since this is low enough that the 6th string buzzes when plucked rather hard (which it will also do when fretted, but not as easily), I am not going to keep the first fret action this low. It feels nice, and it has good intonation, but it's really, really low to the deck.

Fender also specifies action as 4/64" at the 12th fret, all the way across. I originally set it up like that, but the treble side really does not need to be up that high. I'm sticking with the action numbers specified earlier in this thread, measured at the 17th fret. 5/64 at the 17th and 4/64 at the 12th are pretty much equivalent, at least on this instrument.

The locking tuners should arrive in the next couple days, and I hope they help alleviate the tuning drift. Some of it is also due to the cheap stamped metal string tree (I'm only using one), but it will be a while longer before my roller string trees arrive (and I will use both, so I'll have to fill the hole in the headstock and make two new ones). The instrument sounds wonderful when the tuning is dead on, but it's no fun trying to keep it there for more than ten minutes at a time, or when using the whammy bar. Or bending. Or just hitting the strings really hard. It's not the nut (it's graphite at the moment), so it has to be one of the other parts. The high E doesn't need a string tree because I moved its tuning peg to the underside of the headstock, roughly parallel to the A string's tuner. Yet it still goes flat after big bends, so this isn't all due to the craptacular string tree either. (Before you ask, yes the strings are quite thoroughly broken in by now.)

I don't expect the mere addition of a locking element to the tuners to fix anything, but I have some hope that they are of generally higher quality than the ones that came with the kit. The included ones are so twitchy that laying the instrument down on a soft surface like a bed, and the light pressure this induces on the tuner buttons, will cause strings to go flat.

Another place I'm going to completely ignore Fender's spec is on pickup height. They recommend a mere 4/64" between last-fretted string and pickup when using humbuckers, and I tried this. I got weird tuning issues and strings that sounded like they were starting to come unwound. I'll figure out the exact numbers I want to use later, but I lowered the pickups to 6/64" below for now and they seem to no longer interfere with the strings. I had them at 8/64" when I was just guessing at the spec, and that sounded pretty good. This is the recommended height for "Texas Special" pickups (on the bass side, treble recommendation is 6/64), so at least my guess wasn't totally stupid.
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