Manufacturing Thor: Part 4


Part 4: Cracking Thor’s Nut

OK, So… Your frets are metal. Your tuning machines are metal. Your bridge is metal. And your nut is… eh… plastic? Bone? Or some kind of synthetic material resembling bone?

The nut we use for Thor is made of laser-cut stainless steel, buffed to perfection. It matches the sonic and mechanical properties of Thor’s stainless-steel frets.

 

We start as usual with a CAD design. 

Trivia: Did you know that nut notches are not equally spaced? Interestingly, when the strings are equally spaced, they do not feel equally spaced. The thicker bass strings appear to be crammed together. We take that into account. Here’s our CAD design:

 

We send the design over for laser-cutting. We use type 316 stainless steel:

We fine-shape the nut and incorporate a slight downward slope into the slots. Before buffing, we sand the nut with progressively finer grit sand paper.

Trivia: These nuts were created ten years ago while working on the Alpha prototype. Along with it, there are some blunders, such as these laser-cutting failures:


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T. Morimura
T. Morimura
11 months ago

Hi Joel, I always look forward to your exciting posts.
I will introduce technologies that may fit the Thor’s concept.
There are two.

  1. Paul Eliasson – adjustable compensation nut : Tuning (fret=Equal Temperament) can be optimized on a per-string basis (you can adjust both the length of the string and the height of the string). This allows for wider and more flexible adjustments than other compensation nut/tuning systems.
  2. Fujigen – Circle Fretting System (C.F.S) : The nut and frets are concentric and curved relative to the radial strings, and the pitches of the different strings are aligned by intersecting at right angles to the frets.

These should contribute to improved tuning, resonance, and (in a broad) balance.
Check it out if you’re interested. I hope I can help you a little. Please keep up the great work! Thank you.

T. Morimura
T. Morimura
11 months ago
Reply to  Joel de Guzman

Thank you for the reply, Joel.
Actually, there is another one. It is an “optical guitar pickup” that Kickstarter and YouTube are each developing. I find it very cool to imagine them being mounted in a that blank position on the Thor (I’d be glad if you agreed).

I wasn’t sure if I should tell you these things, but I couldn’t resist the urge to share them as one of your ardent fans. Please forgive me if I’m rude. Your posts is my pleasure. Thanks so much.

T. Morimura
T. Morimura
11 months ago
Reply to  T. Morimura

P.S. Another good pickup to mount in the blank position may be the “Splitz Sound Inc. Biax True Stereo Pickups” (a great legacy).
With all due respect to the Thor project and our predecessors.

T. Morimura
T. Morimura
11 months ago
Reply to  Joel de Guzman

Certainly, optical pickups are used more on electric-acoustic guitars and basses than on electric guitars.
SSI’s Biax H series has a unique feature not found in the Nu multi in that it distinguishes the up and down of the picking and outputs it in stereo, but it was not a good proposition because there is already a circuit under the blank position.

Either way, the Nu Multi is the best multichannel pickup ever.

T. Morimura
T. Morimura
10 months ago
Reply to  Joel de Guzman

Here is the patent information. SSI Biax H series picks up sound with two pole pieces for one string.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4348930A/en

By the way, it seems that it was installed on a guitar owned by Steve Vai 😉

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