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My stationary power tools, and what I mainly use them for (going around the room):

Sorby Pro Edge. Best power sharpening system I've ever seen. Not everybody's cup of tea. I sharpen just about all edge tools with it.

Jet 17" floor model drill press, on a mobile base. Drilling holes, obviously. I also use a Luthier's Friend on it, which is useful for thicknessing nut and saddle blanks, and profiling some bridges.

ClearVue cyclone dust collector, with 6" PVC pipe going to as many tools as possible. It will suck up a tape measure, but that's not what I use it for.

Ridgid hybrid table saw with short Vega fence. Gosh, what don't I use this for? I use it for every sort of straight cut of wood. I cut fret slots with it. I cut kerfs in kerfed lining with it. I cut purfling lines from dyed veneers. I use it a lot. This also houses my router table in the left wing. I have a lift in the router table

, and just use a Porter Cable PC 690. Nothing fancy. The lift is wonderful to have.

DIY 12" disc sander. I bought a used 12" steel disc from someone who "chop shopped" an old Delta sander, then I harvested a cheap motor from a Harbor Freight sander, hooked up a shaft and some pillow blocks, and wham, I have an awesome disc sander. I set it up with the ledge a la Kevin Ryan, so I can do convex curve template sanding with it. Wonderful tool.

DIY 24" powered dish sander. There is a thread here on the OLF with photos and a description of my powered dish sander. It is powered much the same way the 12" sander is, but with an extra shaft for reduction pulleys. Another wonderful tool. No driving the bus for me!!!

Jet 14" bandsaw with riser. Another tool I use for darn near everything. Just a normal bandsaw, used the way bandsaws are used in guitar making.

Delta Rockwell Uniplane. This is new to my shop. I haven't yet incorporated it into my building, but I have high hopes for it. It's a rotary planer with the cutters on the vertical reference surface. It will serve as a jointer, but it can do a lot more. We'll see how it goes.

Pre-Jet Performax ShopPro 25. This is a Mac Daddy drum sander. The drum has pillow blocks on both ends (non-cantilevered), so it is very solid. 25" width capacity, can go as thick as 4" or as thin as 1/32", and as short as 2.25". Everything goes through this to clean up and flatten the faces, and arrive at the right thickness. I can't think of any parts of the guitar that don't go through my drum sander at some point.

Ridgid spindle/belt sander. All concave curves get smoothed out with this spindle sander. I use the belt sander for anything that needs fast stock removal, and/or I don't care how gross a job it is, because the belts are super cheap.

For handheld power tools, I use the much-maligned Bosch Colt for laminate trimmer duties (including in all the normal jigs, like a binding channel cutting tower, and a circle cutting setup with the Bishop Cochran router base). I use a Foredom for Dremel-type tasks, like notching for brace ends and inlay work. I use Festool hand sanders and a Festool dust extractor for sanding. I use a Homestead Finishing QualSpray spray gun and a California Air Tools compressor for spray finishing, as well as a 3M PAPR system for PPE during spray finishing. I use a DeWalt battery powered drill. I bend sides using a Luthier's Bench bending iron, which is wonderful. Everything else is probably a hand tool of some sort.

With a small 10" bandsaw, I've used one of those long tool hanging magnets from Harbor Freight as a fence with a fine 1/8" blade to get thin strips, the more TPI the better.

It's a 1949 Craftsman.


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Thanks, Clay. For veneers, I don't use blades like the one to which you linked because the kerf is usually around 1/16" for blades that size. That's about 3 times the size of the kerf made by the StewMac blade. I do, however, use Freud Diablo blades of that size all the time for other woods. For veneers, the stuff is expensive enough where I want to keep the kerfs as tiny as possible. Hence the use of the StewMac blade.

Darrel--

I covet that Byrnes saw! I owned a Proxxon saw like that for a very short time a few years ago, and I did not care for it, so I sold it off. It was both underpowered and not as precise as I was looking for. I am sure the Byrnes saw suffers from neither deficiency. With the StewMac fret slotting blade and some other very thin blades, I can get what I want from my standard table saw, but a smaller work surface would make operations like this a bit easier.

I wanted to mention (but failed to do so above) that, in addition to protecting your fingers, the main point of the blade capture board is to shepherd the veneer through the cut path without it bending and going in unhelpful directions. The veneer is very flexible, and you only want to use your fingers to guide it when they are not close to the blade. Between the auxiliary fence, the zero clearance throat plate, and the blade capture board, the veneer has nowhere to go but forward as you feed it into the blade.

Every time I use my disc sander to rough out the shape of a bone nut I say, "I love power tools".