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I bought this little drum sander for thicknessing veneers and other small inlay parts (the accuracy is remarkable, my square and herringbone inlays are now completely consistent). It just so happens to be absolutely perfect for thicknessing nuts and saddles too, can't recommend highly enough!

https://www.byrnesmodelmachines.com/sander5.html

Looks like a cool little tool.

I modified a tool to use for thicknessing saddles, nuts and other small parts. I'll try to remember to take a photo tomorrow.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

I rough out my nut blanks by hand on a 6" disc sander, then complete with judicious filing and sanding. I use calipers when measuring the length and height, but for thickness I use a micrometer for accuracy. When sanding for thickness, I use a figure 8 pattern to reduce the tendency to remove more on one side versus the other.

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

I just sand them 'till theys fits.

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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.

For us there are two "CTQ's" in Six Sigma quality control speak CTQ means as per Demming "critical to quality."

First is it has to be fast because we are in a production environment. Time is money to us and not in the sense of raking it in, stand alone repair shops fail all of the time so you have to be a good business person too or your very survival is in question.

Second it has to be accurate and top quality work, always with no exceptions.

So with this said we use Dan Earlywine's Dad's belt sander that we have kept alive all these years and love. It has 80 grit on it and Dave holds everything by hand nuts and saddles. I hold nuts by hand (no jokes please, well maybe a few...) but saddles are too close to the moving belt for me so I use a carrier board with doubled up duct tape holding the saddle in place. The board is shorter than the saddle so I can add emphasis with fingers based upon my Starrett caliper that I measure each corner (four corners) of the saddle as I progress with the sanding. Goal is to get close and save the rest for finish sanding.

The tape does heat up and get gummy but this is supposed to be a quick operation to get in the ball park + .003" or so before we leave the belt sander.

We have carrier boards with stops on the end for saddles too but I like the small block with duct tape method better I can still press one end or one corner more than the others into the belt.

Then it goes to my bench and if it was a saddle I pull it off the tape and use naphtha on the saddle blank to get rid of the stickum from the heat of sanding that stuck to the saddle blank.

I keep a leveling beam for fret work at my bench, 5 of them in fact and use the beam with 220 sitting right next to the guitar to final thickness the saddle trial fitting each end as I go.

Saddle slots are more often than not not uniform and one end may be wider than the other. So we make our saddles fit what it is and in some instances use our Collins saddle mill to slightly expand the slot and make it uniform but we only do this when the saddle slot bottom sucks and is not flat and needs to be corrected. Saddle slot bottoms can often, often be the source of balance issues with pick-ups with USTs on acoustic guitars.

So to summarize 80 grit belt sander done by hand mostly and then final sanded on leveling beam at bench frequently trial fitting.

My final sanding is not really final either I allow for some 320 grit hand sanding to remove scratches and then we go to the Collins nut and saddle buffer and shine it all up which slightly takes off material too.

We like our nuts to be a tight enough fit that you can pick up the neck end of the guitar by it and saddles should not wobble and be snug but still freely move up and down. The drop, small drop of medium CA we use for our nuts is insurance only the good fit does the heavy lifting of fitting properly.

A thing that we see often that we don't do is the ends must also fit the curvature of the slot with no gaps and there should be no side to side slop in the saddle fit either.

If folks want a challenge craft a through saddle to fit perfectly. It's a work of art when complete and if it ever needs to come down you take the top down and then recrown. Well made through saddles will fit perfectly with zero gaps anywhere.

Similar to several others, I have a 1/4" X 3" X 24" carrier to send thru my thickness sander. I can attach several saddles or nuts to the carrier, with double sided tape. If I want 3/32" saddles, I will bring the blanks down to around .100" on my thickness sander, and then go to to my hand sanding jig pictured below.

The hand sanding jig has a carrier, with side sleds that keep the carrier level from end to end and from side to side. It has 3 slots made by gluing on high tech popsicle sticks to keep the blanks aligned. The sleds on the carrier are set to go a little thinner than .100" and are a little wider than 2 3/4", so that it will straddle a strip of sticky back sand paper. The base, with the sand paper has side rail to keep the carrier aligned over the sand paper. Then I can add strips of masking tape, as shims in each slot of the carrier, to get the saddle thinner. The masking tape is around .004" thick, so I can sand down in small increments until it fits the slot. I find that my 3/32" router bit makes the slot a hair wider than .0937.
Ignore the little strips of craft stick and sand paper on the top of the carrier. That is a long ago abandoned project.

Here's what I've been using. I bought a 2" belt x 6" disc sander to keep near the setup bench (not that anything is very far away in my shop - ha) and I keep 120 paper on it. It's super handy but I also made a little adjustable tilt table to fit under the bottom roller on the belt that works great for rough thicknessing small stuff like nuts and saddles. I can easily get them to within 0.005" then I finish them up on the surface plate.

Sander is mounted to a little roll-around cabinet so I can move it around if I need to. I forgot that saddle vice was sitting there, I got that from StewMac or somebody years ago - it's not very useful.


I just use a flat piece of scrap to feed the material through the sander


Wood holder with a recess in it to hold the saddles and the half pyramid looking block is good for holding parts at a right angle while I sand them; lets me get a good square edge on saddle bottoms and such.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

I use a hand plane to thickness the nut and saddle. I find a Stanley low-angle block plane works well if you sharpen the edge to a steeper bevel to hold up with the hard bone. Harder irons, such as the Lee Valley, tend to chip, even with a sharp bevel.

The jig itself is simple. Glue a couple of rails to a piece of plywood that are spaced out so that your plane will just run between them. Glue in a shim by the rail on either side that is just a bit thicker than you want the saddle to be. The shim should go in just to the cutter on either side. Glue a stop in at the end.

Drop a thick saddle blank into the jig and plane on it until the plane stops cutting. The tool will be riding on it's side rails and the cutter will have taken the bone down to just below that level. I like to leave it a bit thick so that I can sand and polish the surfaces, but with a sharp cutter and a light cut they can be perfectly useful off the jig.

For the nut I like to make the jig tapered, so that the nut is a few thousandths wider on the bass side than the treble. Make the nut a tad long, slide it in from the side and mark the treble end to cut off. When you've got that right trim off the bass end. The nut will wedge into place and stay with no need to glue it, and it's easy to remove when you want.

Ahh. Thanks Alan. I usually saw close, and file holding them by hand. I hold almost everything by hand. So many parts, and the actual instruments just don't make it easy to clamp.

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Why be normal?

I'm going to try the hand plane method for sure. No smelly bone dust, I find that appealing plus I love any excuse to use my hand planes. Thanks for that Alan.

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Hutch

Get the heck off the couch and go build a guitar!!!!

I just glue various grits of paper to granite remnants and do it by hand. Cheap. It works. Thick glassy tiles fro big box stores work too. I don’t like over thinking stuff like this

After many years of painstaking R&D I have developed what I believe to be the world’s most advanced jig for this purpose:



Plans are available for download on my website ($14.99 + tax)

Josh wins…

Since there are lots of quality answers already, I’ll show my likely useless answer. I do them vertically. They come out with a radius on the top. Same number of swipes on each grit of micromesh and they fit every time.










Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

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When this thread first started over a year ago, I was using a Luthier's Friend in a drill press. It worked pretty well. However, since that time, I lucked upon a used Byrnes drum sander as referenced by Brian (Oval Soundhole) above. I'm with him; it is a fantastic tool for thicknessing nuts and saddles, as well as any other small thing, like a headplate, heel cap, tail wedge, etc. If you can find a used one, it is a no brainer.

I sand the bottoms of nuts and saddles flat with one of those metal jigs that has four sealed bearings on the bottom. It works great. The tops I just freehand on a disc sander, after marking the arcs with a pencil.

I wish you guys could watch how we make a saddle from a femur bone in five minutes or so banging it out on Dan Earlywine's Dad's belt sander with 80 grit on it.

No paraphernalia required just occasional trial fitting and it goes very fast.

So what has not been mentioned is putting that final shine on your nuts.... and saddles. I know many of you are micro meshers so here is where I mention the Collins nut buffer.

My nuts have never been shinier Should I post a pic?

Sounds like the perfect topic for one of Dave's YouTube videos Hesh

Hesh wrote:
"I wish you guys could watch how we make a saddle from a femur bone in five minutes or so banging it out on Dan Earlywine's Dad's belt sander with 80 grit on it."

How long did it take you to do your first one? My students can knock out their first saddle in a few minutes with a sharp plane, and don't need years of practice. Of course, you need to know how to sharpen the plane... The plane method doesn't as bad.

Plane, sander it's all good what matters to us is getting it done and excellent results. And.... we don't have to sharpen Dan's Dad's Sander and belt changes take less than a minute....

Seriously though we are often having to match a saddle or nut to an imperfect home meaning the channel or slot it lives in. So with the sander I can apply a tad more finger pressure to one side or the other and make imperfect nuts and saddles to match the imperfect slots. I have to believe that this "dialing in" and fitting is more productive on a sander.

OK, I have to admit that I like John's drum sander idea above.