Fret Tang Remover

I was building a pair of flamenco guitars, and needed to take the tangs off of the frets above the soundboard so I could just glue them in rather than pressing or hammering them in. I got the idea from watching Paco Chorobo's Flamenco Guitar Building video class at O'Brien Guitars.

I was using stainless steel fret wire, so filing them by hand was not going to work very well. I cobbled up a little jig for milling the tangs off of stainless steel fret wire. The picture on the right shows 2 pieces of fret wire, the upper one is "de-tanged: and the lower one is not.

Below on the left is a sketch I made beforehand. The other 2 pictures show the jig in-use. It's rotated 90 degrees clockwise from the sketch. The tangs on the fret wire had ground a groove in the brass by the time I was done. It still worked fine, I just hadn't thought about that.

And of course I found out later that StewMac has a jig for doing this much better, without needing a drill press, called "The Fret Barber".

End Slot Routing Jig

To the left is a picture of a jig I made to guide my Dremel router for routing out the end strip. It's made up of 1-inch aluminum angle stock, sloted and held together with four 6-32 bolts, washers and nuts. It's fiddley to adjust, but once its adjusted and clamped in place, the job goes quickly.

The guitar body is being held in the guitar body vise shown below.

Bridge Radius Sander

Tools don't get much simpler than the bridge radiusing sander shown on the right. A 2-foot long piece of 2x2 red oak, with the radius rough cut and then sanded in an LMI 25-foot radius dish. It is actually dome shaped, not just a curve (although a 25-foot radius on something only 2 inches wide is hard to spot). A strip of self-stick sandpaper completes it. It took longer to radius this thing than it does to radius a bridge with it. I recently had to make another one for a 30-foot radius. I clearly marked them both with a big fat sharpie, so I don't use the wrong one. That would be bad.

Below are 2 pictures of my small mobile workbench that I call "the vise squad". Everything in my shop is mobile - it's a small room but I have a very large area outside the shop where I can wheel stuff out to and park when it isn't needed. The left picture shows a guitar body vise, for gently securing a guitar body when routing the neck mortise, and other things. Made out of pipe clamps. The big red vise is a pattern makers vise, from StewMac. I love this thing! And on the other side is a blue Yost quick-release vise. After I got it I realized it's a quick set vise also - squeeze the little lever and you can slide it open or closed, and just use the handle to tighten it. Saves me several seconds a day!