Share your successes and failures with home maintenance so others can learn from it. What kinds of gear do you use? What have you found works best for you? What doesn’t?
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Inspired by my about to start sanding down the bridge saddle on my new acoustic tonight while I sip a tea and watch some shows. I didn’t realize if you just loosened the strings, it might just come out by hand. I also thought it was scarier than it seems because of each string having a different offset height for intonation. Surprised how simple it is, you sand the bottom down, not the top. I read 120 grit sandpaper, flat, even passes. So here goes!
A big mistake I made for years was too low of action. I used tightening my truss rod to compensate I think a lot of the time.
I like the Music Nomad stuff. It’s affordable except for the files I think.
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This is the best way to lower nut height too, don’t buy the luthier nut slot files, huge waste of money for anyone not doing it for a living.
On electric guitars the nut is mainly held down by the strings and the glue just tacks it in place for convenience. They pop off easily.
Most are flat bottomed so just sandpaper and a flat table is fine. For radiused nuts you can use the fretboard as a sanding block.
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This is the best way to lower nut height too, don’t buy the luthier nut slot files, huge waste of money for anyone not doing it for a living.
Mind blown again. I bought the nut height gauges but haven’t checked any of the nuts cuz the filing seems scary. I love that if you screw these filing jobs up, you can replace a nut or bridge saddle relatively cheap too.
I tried on my nylon string first. Took about 1mm off. Can’t believe how much that affects the string tension, sound, and feel.
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What up Zac!
I dig the spirit of this thread. I’m sort of on the other end of the spectrum when it comes to guitar repairs—a little more conservative.
My teacher rec is to only mess with your instrument if you
- have experience or training doing guitar/bass repairs or
- you don’t mind messing up your instrument/you have the budget to pay someone to fix your mistakes.
I know they’re are a LOT of folks on here with fix-it experience who will have successful fix-it endeavours. But this is just general advice I give to all my students. If your guitar feels sick, go see the guitar doctor 
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Had to do the same on the Orlando. IIRC, I just drew a line across the bridge while it was still in the guitar to keep everything parallel and took my time. Don’t recall what I put the sandpaper on, but if I had to do it again I would pick up a sample piece of stone countertop from the home improvement store and use that.
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My Fret Guru has an end meant for checking nut slots and instructions engraved onto it.
With 30+ years in Manufacturing/Engineering an Quality Assurance, I never mess around with something that ‘might work’ or gets used for something else. My guitars are worth a lot to me, and getting the proper tools not only makes the job smoother, easier and more enjoyable, they’re a very small percentage of the total cost of my instrument/amplifier inventory.
On that; I have about 17 hammers, and could stand about five more. 
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I think a big divider in home setups might also be dictated by where you live, not just in access to luthiers. I’m from the Midwest, USA, where we have all four seasons 
. I’m currently going through it right now where every almost every instrument needs some sort of truss adjustment as I shift from summer to winter and start having to run the heat at night. And at least here, it isn’t ever linear, where things don’t really stabilize and stay cold for at least another couple of months.
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Sometimes all in one day, from what I understand. 
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Yeah Japan is the same way (with a fifth official season, tsuyu.) If I didn’t know how to do maintenance on my gear I would be broke - I have to do about one setup a month per instrument on average.
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Central Iowa, representing! I feel you.
I feel like we’ve been going through that here, lately. Non-stop rain.
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I didn’t know that about Japan. I actually love learning about microclimates of regions. This is a joke image, but not entirely inaccurate of the Midwest.
I think currently we are in False Fall, but it’s hard to tell. It was 90F (32 C) here two weeks ago, and this morning it was 45F (7 C). But the leaves are still really green on most trees. So I think we still have a while before Actual Fall.
Which means another setup in a few weeks 
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We’re not technically the midwest, but Colorado checking in. Sometimes we don’t get much of a fall, it can go from summer to winter in 2 weeks but we have all 27 seasons for sure.
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Great point! Getting a pro set up on every guitar you own 4x a year would add up quickly.
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The most adventurous I have been was adjusting the neck relief on my Elite Strat when it was only about a month old. It seemed very buzzy when I got it (ordered online after playing one in a shop, but it wasn’t the same one by the time I was ready to buy). I took it back to the shop and they had it for a few days. I followed them up and they rattled on about something about the frets. They ended up not really telling me what they did, but they had “fixed it”. I stupidly believed them and just picked it up and went home. Well, it was still crap and buzzy as hell. I ended up researching and found out the neck was completely flat so had a go and really small adjustments over a few days. Got it playing nicer but something still felt off. I ended up just mostly leaving it in it’s case for ages. At some point I got curious and had a closer look. I’m pretty sure that when the shop got it back, they had filed some of the frets down, but didn’t recrown them, so they have flat spots.
I wish I’d followed up earlier and just asked for my money back. I still have it and play it from time-to-time, but the joy of finally getting a Strat and not just any old one, a really nice Sky Burst Metallic colour and the Elite model so it has a really nice neck feel and other than the frets sometimes feeling a bit crap, it still plays nice.
I’ve since lowered the action of a few different bridges, including a fully Locking one which I was happy with the result. I’ve also cleaned out a dirty pickup selector by sliding a piece of paper between the contacts.
That’s probably about as much as I’ve done, but I have a couple of guitars that either need the pickup selector cleaning or replacing and maybe one of the pots is dirty or worn out on another. I’m definitely keen to learn more. Maybe one day, I’ll do a guitar building course to really understand how they go together 
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Hmm, I’m curious when you were encountering the buzzing? Open strings? Certain fretted notes? Certain strings? That can be a super frustrating rabbit hole to go down.