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Two views of a home-made thickness guage. It cost me about $10 some scrape wood and about an hour. The guage is accurate to one thousandth of an inch. The U frame flexes about another .001 of an inch. |
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This may look like a picture of a guitar, but it is a picture of a giant clamp formed by my workbench on the bottom, and the storage loft on top. The guitars fit loosely between the two, and I narrow the gap with a towel folded enough to hold the instrument firmly, but gently. I use this often, but visiting luthiers must beware: they are not used to the loft, and so bump their materials on it. |
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Ok, it is just a coping saw. I have a hole in the corner of my workbench
with a slot for the coping saw. I can hold the material to be cut
against the workbench while I cut (in this case, a fingerboard soundhole
contour). I don't worry about making the cut too exact because I have a
special sanding tool that cleans it up. Below you can see that the bottle
is exactly the right size to fit in the soundhole, and to contour the end
of the fingerboard.
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I hold coarse and fine grits of sandpaper on the bottle with adhesive and rubber bands. The bottle has a child-proof top. It won't come off unless you push down while turning in the right direction. It acts like a bearing. I hold this cap end with one hand. The other end of the bottle is mounted in a plastic jelly container which as a bolt mounted in it for insertion into the drill chuck. This gets the fingerboard contour really close. |
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The thing to the left is a circle cutter made out of four pieces of wood and 3 pieces of metal. I use this tool to cut the channel for rosettes, sound holes, and here I am cutting a golpeador (tap plate). The blade is an old scroll saw blade. The blade is wedged into a mortise with another piece of wood. This adjusts the depth of cut. The assembly holding the blade slides in and out of the "carriage", and is held in any position by the wege at the other end. The wedge presses against a split pin and the sliding assembly. The center of the circle is kept with a 3/16" hole stud, the type used to keep three hole punch paper together. |
