Fitting a Guitar Nut Thats Too Small

[Chainsaw Calligraphy]

I'm halfway through a project build at the moment. The guitar has a typical fender style non-locking trem. I recently ordered a graphtech nut to replace the one that came stock whith the neck I'm using. The nut is the right hight and fits the width of the fretboard perfectly. The only problem is that its one or two millimeters too narrow to fill out the nut slot properly. As it's not a tight fit it does move around a little bit. What I'm wandering is, can I get away with just gluing the nut down and relying on the tension of the strings to help hold it in place? I'm also considering trying to make a shim to fill in the gap and make sure it's a tight fit in the slot. Any guitar techs out there who could offer some advice?

 

[Terminus]

It would always be better to take it to a pro but without seeing it, yeah, a shim would be better since it would prevent any play in the nut backwards and forwards if that were to occur at some point. Nuts are pretty cheap, you might even be better off just buying another one in the correct size, assuming that's possible.

lol so many innuendos in that post.

 

[Chainsaw Calligraphy]

It would always be better to take it to a pro but without seeing it, yeah, a shim would be better since it would prevent any play in the nut backwards and forwards if that were to occur at some point. Nuts are pretty cheap, you might even be better off just buying another one in the correct size, assuming that's possible.

lol so many innuendos in that post.

If it was an option I would just buy a new nut. Unfortunatly this is the closest size to the stock nut that Graphtech make. I could also just put the stock nut back in but I'm pretty set on getting a Graphtech one. I'll try making a shim then.

Off topic: Thanks for the free music by the way, Thule Dreaming and Terminus have been on my insomnia playlist for a while now.

 

[Terminus]

Thanks man, glad you found it worth listening to.