Official Luthiers Forum!

Has anyone here tried actually making their own tuner buttons? I don't think it would be the easiest thing to do, but perhaps somewhat fun. Plus then you could have the choice of any wood you have on hand. LMI sells replacement buttons here, so obviously you can take off the old and fit new ones. 

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Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Louis Hector Berlioz

Chansen / C hansen / C. Hansen / Christian Hansen - not a handle.

Christian

... I forgot to add....

Thanks!
Christian

_________________
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Louis Hector Berlioz

Chansen / C hansen / C. Hansen / Christian Hansen - not a handle.

Christian

I haven't yet but am planning on trying it for my current builds.
My only question is how to make the flat side on the hole so it wont spin on
the shaft?

[QUOTE=Jebarri]I haven't yet but am planning on trying it for my current builds.

My only question is how to make the flat side on the hole so it wont spin on

the shaft?





[/QUOTE]

It would be pretty permanent, but I was thinking these could be epoxied
and press fit onto the shaft. I saw the Gotoh replacements had a screw,
but neither my Schaler or Grover (both open gear... don't know if that
matters) don't have any such hardware. Anyone know how those are on?

_________________
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Louis Hector Berlioz

Chansen / C hansen / C. Hansen / Christian Hansen - not a handle.

Christian

Christian,

Here are two photos of a set of ebony & snakewood buttons that I made mounted on Gotoh classical tuners. They were a fun side project and the Gotoh tuner buttons are removeable with screws on the shafts so they didn't have to be pulled off with any special tooling.

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Peter

Those look really sharp, that is part of the reason I wanted to do it - it could be a laminated piece. Thanks for the pics! Was this a difficult process?

_________________
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Louis Hector Berlioz

Chansen / C hansen / C. Hansen / Christian Hansen - not a handle.

Christian

Christian,

I took a 6" long piece of ebony and routed the slots on each side to inlay the snakewood. The snakewood was a leftover piece of binding. If you look closely you'll see that there still is about 1/16" of ebony between the two inlaid pcs. of snakewood.

After inlaying the snakewood I drilled the holes for the tuner shafts using my dremel drill-press set-up. I then cut the log into the 6 pcs. and used a very small modelmakers square file to square the holes in the buttons so they don't spin on the tuner shafts. The last thing I did was to shape them on the belt sander and some final filing and sanding with 600.

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Peter

That's nice work Peter. The snakewood kind of looks like tortoise shell (the real stuff) in this application.