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Do Bone saddles/nuts stink when you belt sand them? I did it for the first time last night and the smell overwhelmed my entire shop . Is this normal?

Thanks,

Doug Ubele

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Guitars...One's too many...Twenty is not enough.

VERY normal -

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Lance@LuthiersForum.com

Pretty much

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Tickle your guitar daily, and it'll tickle you back.

Can you buy any that smells like 'spring air'?

Yeah but they don't sound too good. Kinda Squishy

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Tickle your guitar daily, and it'll tickle you back.

Try Buffalo...you'd think is was hove not horn. And then after all that... the stuff dosen't even sound that good...The bone smells like heaven compared to the Buffalo. well...maybe not heaven...

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Dave Bland

remember...

"If it doesn't play in tune...it's just pretty wood"

Think of it this way, when your shop smells like that, this means you must be close to finishing a guitar.

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Wade
Nashua, NH
http://www.wadefx.com

Ivory stinks too.... smells like the dentist is digging a hole for a filling.

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Looks like I'm not alone. I couldn't believe how bad it stunk. I almost had to evacuate.

Yeah, I'm close to finishing my first. I get too smell my shop up again because I blew through a nut due to impatience. I took too much off on the belt sander. Now I have to wait 3 days until my Stew-Mac order shows up. Serves me right for rushing. I can't wait to string it up to see if it works.

Thanks guys,

Doug Ubele

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Guitars...One's too many...Twenty is not enough.

A couple of ways to mitigate that problem:
1) wet sand. Bone cuts a lot faster when it's wet, and you can remove a lot of material in a hurry with some 220 wet paper on a glass sheet.
2) plane it. I find my old Stanley 60-1/2 low angle block plane works great on bone if the iron is sharpened to a somewhat shorter bevel than normal. You can use a microbevel. The Veritas iron is too hard, and tends to chip, but the Stanley keeps going, particularly if I wet the bone.

I just made a little plane jig for thinning out saddles, and it speeded the work up a lot. I glued two guide rails to a piece of plywood with CA, so that the plane would just run between them. Then I glued down pieces of cuttoff stock from a rosewood back that were the same thickness as the slot I was trying to fit, to form a slot between the rails as wide as the height of the saddle blank, with a stop at the end. Finally, I used CA to glue two strips of file folder stock on either side for the edges of the plane outside of the throat to run on.

The idea is that the plane will cut anything that sticks up above the sides of the slot, but will stop cutting when it's riding on the little rails formed by the CA hardened paper. The paper is a little more than the thickness of the plane cut, so when the plane stops cutting the bone blank is just a little thicker than I want it. A bit of lapping on wet sandpaper or a diamond sharpening stone will polish it up nicely and trim it to an exact fit. This works very fast, and reduces the anmount of stinky bone dust in the air to a minimum.

I got the idea years ago from Brian Burns, and although I've used the plane jig a lot, have only now gotten around to doing with it what he did; trimming saddles. As usual, I wonder why I didn't do it sooner.

i suppose my nose is a bit insensitive to such odours after i put shoes on horses for over 40 yrs, and seating a hot shoe generates a whole lot more smoke than sanding a little itty bitty bit of bone.

I too often make a smelly cloud of bone dust and have heard that bone dust is not good for you to breath,

is this true?   

Alan thanks for sharing the wet sanding and saddle thinning tip.

I have been over grinding my saddles and it has been difficult for me to thin saddles evenly. I almost never get it right in the first try and end up over thinning often.
Matt

Matt

Alan,

I would love to see picures of your jig. Can you post some here?

I thinned my first saddle the other night. It is thinner on the ends versus the middle.

Thank,

Doug

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Guitars...One's too many...Twenty is not enough.

Al, I find your bone thinning jig idea pretty interresting. I have some questions and a comment. First, do you actually get shavings off of bone or do you get something more like scraper shavings? Second, Why a low angle plane? My intuition tells me a scraper plane would work better. I don't know why I think that though.

I'm currently reading a book on computer software engineering called Design Patterns. The basic idea of the book is that engineers develop a tool kit of "tricks" or approaches to solving a problem and that they re-use these "design patterns" over and over again. The book then goes on to identifiy and name 23 patterns that are the most useful and that if you knew these patterns it would save you a lot of time because you wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel. I've noticed an analogous phenomena in luthierie or many other crafts as well. For example, you started to use these little planing blocks to make your rosette pieces. When you look at a problem that involves thinning small pieces, and there seems to be no shortage of these problems in luthierie, you go to your plane block "design pattern" as one of your first approaches at solving the problem. Other luthiers have never made a plane block and solve those problem in other completely different ways.

I guess that is what I like about forums like this. You can develop an enormous tool kit of techniques without having to spend years at it. Which leads me to my next point. Binding channels.

I just recently finished binding a couple of guitars. I used Don Williams wonderful jig to cut the channels. This jig uses router bits with bearings to set the width of the channel. My binding was in between two bearing sizes so I made the channel narrow and scraped the binding flush. Your idea, however, gives me an idea. Instead of cutting a binding channel to match the width of the binding, why not make the binding match the channel?

What I would do is cut the binding channel into a block of wood, glue another block of wood to it to make a slot instead of a rabbet. You now have a slot that is the width and height of the binding channel on the guitar. Now make a plane block just as you describe and then plane the binding to fix exactly into the binding channel. I haven't tried this since I just thought of it but I'm optimistic that the technique could be quite effective.
Mike Mahar38463.3668865741

Mike:
I get shavings off the bone if the plane is sharp. If it's not it just skates along...

The plane jig idea was one I had 'known' about for a longt time: I had read a description of it in comnnection with making bamboo fly rods. I never thought of it as a lutherie tool until Brian Burns showed me his little jig for thinning saddles. My first use of it was for making rosette parts, and I didn't apply it for saddles until I was backed into a corner, and needed to make 14 identical bone pieces in a hurry for a dulcimer making class.

At the moment I don't have the wherewithal to post pictures easily. My nephew's games finally got the better of my main computer, and I'm making do with a laptop that only has a CD drive, no floppy. I have no good way of getting small amounts of data on and off it except by e-mail. I suppose I could try to generate a drawing in 'paint' or something, but it's likely to take a while (no mouse, either), and be pretty big. I hope to get the other machine back on line in a few days: I'm actually postponing working on it until after school vacation, in part as a means to impress on him the inconvienience of the whole thing.

If your belt is of the waterproof variety you can use a "kool mist" rig to
wet sand/ grind. It's a mixture of compressed air and coolant (mostly
water with an anti-rust agent)
There's no collection or re-circulation to worry about, but it will drip onto
your shoes...
BTW, I use one of these on my chisel/plane iron grinding rig.
-C

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Freeborn Guitars
and home of BeauGuard©

I use a good dust collector along with a good dust mask and keep most of the bone sanding in my machine room which is separate from my main bench room. The only way to get rid of the smell is to ventilate the room with outside air. Most of the dust that we create, including bone, is not good for our lungs. Protect them.