Official Luthiers Forum!

As promised here is a shot of our nut buffer and as you can see it's pretty simple. I have one at home too that was just a cheap grinder that I replaced the wheels with buffing wheels. The compound is the white stuff from decent hardware stores. It works great and your nuts will never be as shiny as they are when you use this on them. Just be sure no one sees you do it....

And since I brought it up here is our belt sander that does not like men very much..... As you can see it's unsafe as can be so don't do this at home or anywhere else. BTW this belt sander has history and used to belong to Dan E's Dad.

Yup, I've been bitten by my 90" x 6" belt sander early days, several times, with a guard on -trying not to repeat that.
Missing fingertips are bad enough, painful, and inconvenient.

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

Losing epidermis and fingernails to a belt sander is a right of passage for most luthiers, isn't it? Personally, I use a small diameter disc sander and every time I use it I say to myself, "I love power tools".

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Losing fingernails is a right of passage for framers too, I think. My first day on the job as a rookie framer using my shiny brand new 30 oz framing hammer with the sharp pointy diamond pattern on the face of the head, I hit a glancing blow on a 16 penny nail and took the entire fingernail clean off my left index finger in the blink of an eye.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

Bet you saw stars behind your eyelids.
How long before you stopped bleeding?

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

Framing is painful for newbies. I was new on the job. Trying to learn to set 16d nails with my brand new 32oz waffle-head rigging axe. Kept smashing my index finger and thumb on my left hand. Fingerprints were messed up for months. Fortunately I wasn't as self destructive when they let me use the worm drive SkilSaw. I still have the rigging axe.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

It did hurt quite a bit, but, surprisingly, there was very little blood. The points on the hammer face gripped the nail and pulled it out cleanly with no contact to the skin around the nail. The nail bed where the nail had been didn't actually bleed much. It took months for a new nail to grow back in.

Steve - Thanks for reminding me that the pattern on the hammer face is called a waffle pattern. The contractor I worked for used that exact same type of hammer/axe as his framing hammer. We were non-union so he could get away with it. My favorite memory of his hammer was the day he got in a dispute with the general contractor for a housing development we were working on over non-payment of money my boss was owed. That guy decided to high tail it out of there in his truck and my boss threw his hammer like a tomahawk and the axe side left a nice big dent in the tailgate of that guy's truck. Fun times.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

There used to be a lot of those money disputes. That axe would make a good weapon, bet it left a good dent. Different days for sure, worked hard but did have a lot of fun.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

I see guys on construction sites now walking around with an air gun driving framing nails with a light squeeze of a trigger. One guy framing a wall with 10min on the chop saw and 5 minutes with a framing gun. All I can do is shake my head remembering the hot summers I helped my dad hitting my thumb every three blows with a hammer and cursing the very concept of a 2x4.


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It sure is a rite of passage seemingly. I've got a smaller disc sander that I prefer in my home shop too. Lot less vacuum needed too to keep from breathing the dust.

Speaking of shortened fingers, I learned the hard way not to try to cut a round piece of wood (a log,essentially) with a band saw. Still thinking how stupid that was. You don't need to be a genius to envision what would happen if (when) the blade bound into the log, and sent it back at me.. (at a couple hundred miles an hour). Not good. Very lucky not to have lost more than 1/4" off my ring finger - which never came close to the blade. You don't need to get cut to get hurt by power tools if you aren't careful (or don't follow basic common sense).

I was sort of hoping for a demonstration of the castration part.

Hesh?

lol

Hope you're doing well, old friend.

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"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

I've been in that shop and used both of those tools, they get the job done!

I've lost fingernails to framing hammers, to sanders and fingertips to bandsaws. The worst was having my hand sucked into a 36 grit thickness sander while doing something stupid. Kick back on a piece while I had the guards off, and it sanded the top of my hand down to the tenons. A buddy of mine who is an RN, and who I was building guitars with at the time, came into the shop right after I did that and was able to fix me up. Pride ended up hurt worse than hand. Can hardly see the scars now. When the little voice in your head says, "you're stupid," listen...

Still have all my digits but only out of dumb luck.

Dave

Doing great Don and I hope that you are too. Dave keeps 80 grit on that suicide sander se we have to beware of where we stand for sure.

Sorry to hear that Dave and I hope that you don't mind me reposting your message. This is what should be important in this thread, safety. The sander I pictured is not safe please, again, don't build one like this one.

Not that I take pleasure in injury, but we’re reading about injuring yourself via bad decisions, so I thought I would share a cautionary tale. A friend of mine had a mishap a few years ago that could have come from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He was using a gasoline powered pressure washer, with the wand in his right hand. At some point, he needed to move the base unit. Unfortunately, his left hand grabbed a part of the base unit that was extremely hot. Having burned himself, he felt the instinct to cool off his hand with water. So, he aimed and shot high pressure water at his left hand. It hit his hand so hard that he nearly severed a finger. This definitely fails my test for whether to do something unorthodox in my shop: would I feel embarrassed trying to explain myself to the paramedics? My friend Rick is fine; the burn and traumatic injury healed with no issues. But he learned some valuable lessons the hard way.

So far I am lucky with the belt sander knock on wood. The only accident I have had so far was from a radial arm saw. When I finished the rip cut the cut of piece moved sideways and a tooth of the blade grabbed and threw it right into my... Well lets just say groin area O.o

Me go to the doctor? No way. The blood stopped coming out when I peed after about a week.

After that experience I'd loose skin on my finger tips any day

Addition to PPE: Athletic cup.

Where I flirt with injury is sanding the bottoms of Floyd Rose style locking metal nuts on the sander. I keep a cup of water to drop the thing in when it gets hot and it gets to right away. Of course dust collection is off too since this is metal with sparks flying.

My "sand through" happened when my index finger got sucked into a portable belt sander. It sanded the first joint down to the bone and then sanded off the end of the bone. The hand specialist said I wouldn't get the nail back or have much feeling in the end of my finger. But, lizard like, most of the finger regrew, albeit 1/4 inch shorter, the nail came back, slightly crooked and with a hook at the end, and after many years some feeling has returned. I still miss that last bit of length- on the finger!, on the finger! I still miss a few strokes when finger picking.
We tend to view belt sanders as fairly benign (like chisels) until they bite us hard.
Hesh's tools look fairly safe to me - they don't appear to have "pinch points" to grind off body parts.

Clay

You made me cringe - Yow. My only potential was changing a router bit in an old Stanley router with a flippy switch. It was upside down between my legs and I had 2 wrenches on the chuck when the switch flipped and it started humming. I had to call for help while holding the thing. It was like having a 15 foot python by the neck and I think of it often when approaching a power tool. My only blood draws have been with hand tools. One notable one was having a plane laying on its side on the bench like they used to tell you to do back in the 90's. Hit the back of 2 knuckles on the blade and one of them wouldn't stop bleeding for a couple of days

Ed M

Reminded me of an incident someone I knew had happen. He was building his own small house out in the country. His table saw kicked a board back hard enough to sever his femoral artery. Last thing he remembered was reaching to turn off the saw. He passed out first from massive blood loss. He’s on the floor with the saw still running. A woman he knew just happened to be driving by and saw his truck outside and “just happened” to stop to say hello. She found him on the floor and saved his life. She BTW was a registered nurse.

Geez Louise! He used up all his luck on that one. I don't have a table saw or a radial arm saw anymore. I won't go near one.