Official Luthiers Forum!

I put a post on the forum about how I hand turn my bridge pins about a couple of months ago, I`ve now come up with a more mechanized way of making them I`d like to share with you. Instead of hand turning the initial round stock I now use a lovely Veritas tool ( a 3/8" dowel maker ) shown in the photo. Makes rounding the 1/2" square Rosewood balnks a matter of a couple of minutes.



I now employ a jig to turn the 5 degree pin taper. Again this only takes a few minutes to achieve



I wind a couple of wraps of masking tape round the pin taper to protect it from damge from my collett chuck. I then form the head of the pin with a form scaper made from a piece of high speed steel planer blade. This came off a 16" planer thicknesser. I made a nice long paring chisel from the rest of the blade which I use to carve neck heels.



Here`s a couple of photos of the finished pin. The pin above is an Ebony pin with pearl dot from StewMacs. The bottom pin is the home made. I only applied one coat of friction polish to the pin, successive pins will have three coats for a nice high gloss.

Nicely done! Love the taper jig....

To protect the taper, just make a short dowel or something with the female taper in it, and make one cut with a razor blade. Chuck this up, and you have a tapered colet.