Unleashing my Inner Luthier

Did some maintenance and set up this weekend. It was a good day - mostly

While I have never been as mystical as Randy Rhoads¹ about the setup of my guitars, I have always been worried that I would fuck it up. Thus I did very little to alter its settings over the decades I have been playing.

I am fine to change strings, to set/confirm intonation² and other really minor tweaks. I have been scared to do things like set the relief (adjust the truss rod) set string height (also known as action) and to adjust the tremolo block for proper floating.

Mostly, I have worried myself that I would ruin a guitar. Sure, I have read about how to do all of those things, but to actually turn wrenches? Nah, I’m good bro’. I can pay a tech at a local shop to do those things.

Yesterday, I got out of my comfort zone, and did all these things.

Why now?

I will blame that Harley Benton. It came set up out of the box pretty awesome. Perfect relief, intonation was spot on, the action was SCHWEEEEEEEEET³ and I wouldn't have touched it if it wasn’t for two things. First that the manufacturing person who strung the guitar did a mediocre job so that even with locking tuners, the strings still slipped a little. Second that the frets were pretty rough. The latter I can excuse. For a $369 guitar, volume is the name of the game, and fret finishing is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process, so that is a good place to scrimp. The latter? That is just sloppiness. And in a guitar that is meticulously set up in general, it is a head scratcher.

Thus, I figured that polishing the frets to a mirror finish was something I could do with little to no risk.

Off to StewMac to buy some goodies. A fret polishing kit, a machinist’s rule, and a string action gauge found their way into my cart (as well as an on sale set of Gotoh locking tuners), and they arrived on Friday. I also bought a little case to organize these goodies so I have a guitar maintenance kit now. Woo hoo!

This weekend, I committed to myself to:

• Polish the frets

• Replace the tuners

• Restring

• Check and set the relief⁴ of the neck

• Check the action and adjust if need be

This was a bit scary. I really hadn’t gone beyond the restringing and checking of the action on my own in the past, instead I would take it to a tech once a year, pay the $70, and a few days later have a perfect guitar in my hands.

Laziness, yes, this was laziness.

It took about an hour to do all the work. Seriously. It was stupid easy. (I was lucky that the relief was spot on, so I didn’t need tweak the truss rod).

The difference in playability is HUGE. The frets are butter smooth, string bends are not scratchy at all, super clean, super clear, and effortless. The friction that was in my face is gone.

Since I had all the stuff out, I grabbed my main squeeze, the Charvel, off the wall and did a similar activity on it. A couple of months ago, I swapped the 9’s to a hybrid⁵ set, and I got the tension on the tremolo springs almost perfect. But, when a Floyd Rose tremolo is set up by the manufacturer to have a pretty high action, and while I had become used to it, I wasn’t happy.

I did a fret polish, a fine tune of the tremolo springs (to make it parallel to the body when tuned to pitch), and then I took a whack at the action. I set the low E to 0.060” and the high E to 0.050”, and holy cow, it plays AWESOME now. Seriously, it feels like my Tom Anderson.

The Downside

The detailed work with my hands has really wreaked havoc with my arthritis in my hands. Yesterday evening, my hands were like cramped crab claws. Ugh. Time for some vitamin I⁶ and rest. Alas, the playing in of the two guitars will have to wait for a new day. I can hardly wait.

1. Randy Rhoads notably took a hands-off approach to setup, relying on his guitar tech to make it perfect for him to play. I read this in a magazine review decades ago.

2. A guitar is not a perfectly tempered instrument. That means that as you fret notes/chords up the neck, the tuning changes slightly. Setting the intonation gets this as good as it can be.

3. That is a technical term. It means that the action is set low, and super easy to play FAST!

4. Relief is the adjustment to make the neck straight. It is a piece of wood, and on one side of it there are 6 strings pulling on it, making it want to bend in that direction. The relief is how much bend in the other direction will balance that force and keep the neck straight. The relief is how much back bend you have to put into the neck to balance the force of the strings.

5. Hybrid strings use the 9 gauge strings on the high strings, and 10 gauge strings on the low strings. The benefit is a bit meatier lows, a bit more growl, and if you want to rock like early Van Halen you can tune down a half step to play along with the album

6. Ibuprofen tablets

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