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I got an oscillating spindle sander off of CL. It's the big Jet floor model. It's quite a machine. It's nearly silent, runs very smoothly, and I can't bog it down. It makes fast easy work of cleaning up templates and headstocks. The concave curves on electrics clean up in seconds.

So, what else do you have for me? Anyone have creative uses for it that are guitar related?

Thanks,
Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

Neck heels for acoustics....

guitar sides, soundports, neck volutes, body molds!, etc...

if it's bored and lonely i'll kindly take it off your hands......

I figured it would be good for heels. It'd be easy enough to free hand and hope I don't take too big a divot out of it. I wonder if there's a way to jig it up to remove the Mike factor?

That's a slick thing Filippo. I've meant to try to make something similar for my belt sander, but seeing as it's rather under powered and a bit on the twitchy side, I never got around to it. The stop is a cut off from acrylic pipe? Is it strong enough just glued to the surface, or does it need to be set into the hole?

Mike

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Mike Lindstrom

Neck volutes would be great. I don't know about sides. Even if my sides came out perfectly "parallel," how would you hold the body so they were always square to the table? Free handing that seems like something I'd do and something I'd regret doing.

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Mike Lindstrom

I've free-handed sides on a spindle sander - once. I regret doing it

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

I got one from Paulick. Works well. Probably easy to make, but even easier to have him make. I'd rather have some sort of flex shaft for it. Balancing my drill battery and squeezing the trigger, and keeping track of both ends of that rolling pin taxes my feeble skills. Great for tidying up sides though.

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Mike Lindstrom

One of those is on my list. Need something with a motor on the inside and a rotating sleeve on the outside.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

a fine 180/220 grit coupled with a variac. use the transformer to slow the spindle down and things are more controllable that way. if it has variable speed all the better. the finer grit allows you to feel the spindle and makes it easier to guide and find/feel squareness. i do this sometimes with a sanding drum on my milling machine to semi-finish then i'll use a cabinet scraper for final. or i'll do it to bring a top and back quickly flush with a coarser grit to the sides after glue up. i come from a tool&die/mfg. eng./cnc/etc... background so i don't really approach things like a woodworker might. i also use a fair amount of japanese tools and methods which are very different from western woodworking. i do most things concerning wood pretty backward and i'm ok with that.

somogyi's got a carraige type fixture attached to a vert belt sander that he sizes headstocks with. he feeds it into the belt and the drum radius creates the volute. with a adjustable stop he sands in his back plate side/tuner area volute but not the handstop/neck shaft portion -his have a pretty tight radius. something like that could be whipped up, laid sideways, and attached to your sander.

Mike, you're just gaming us....right? Seriously, man, if you've got a nice tool like that, you are capable of thinking up lots of guitar related uses for it....right? You don't need a lot of suggestions....right? Please tell me I've got it figured out.

Patrick

First of all, having a nice tool is simply a matter of writing a check. Inferring capabilities onto me does not follow, and may be foolish. Yes, there are many obvious ways it will be useful, but it sure seems like the kind of thing that will have lots of non-intuitive uses once I've worked with it a while. There's so many great ideas around here. I'm hoping to ride some coattails to the front of the maximum efficiency parade. And it sure wouldn't be the first tool I bought with high hopes that sits collecting dust, but not in the helpful way.

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Mike Lindstrom

A fence allows sanding smaller stuff like bridge wings and brace tapers.






I usually use the belt sander as described for headstock thickness and volute but have a jig that holds the neck at a right angle to the table keying in the truss rod slot and the spindle sander can be used freehand to fine tune the volute.
( shown here holding a neck to rough cut the profile.)

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

I didn't really need or want one. Then my wife bought me one as a surprise birthday gift. I use it all the time and I wonder how I ever got along without. A spindle sander is something that you don't need until you have one.

No need to ever suffer from constipation again.

MIke, I didn't mean to come off like such smart-aleck. I really thought you were having some fun with us. But, seriously, I think the more you use the spindle sander, the more ideas you'll get for using it in new and different ways. I think one of the fun parts of this process is designing and building jigs and fixtures to help us use tools in ways that are new to us. You've seen plenty of inspiration in this thread already. You will probably be posting photos of your own methods of using this tool before long.
Patrick

Yeah, I know. I wish you were right!

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Mike Lindstrom

Gosh, now I want one! My drill press was not made for sanding.

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wah
Wah-wah-wah-wah
Wah

I free handed sides on a belt/disc combination sander. When the belt part is laying flat the end can be used for contour sanding. Just DO NOT use 60 grit belts on the machine and you'll be fine. I used 220 grit belts. It does a very quick job at smoothing the side out for binding and the flat part of the belt can be used to smooth out the outer curves.

I haven't been able to find an oscillating spindle sander in Taiwan. Please don't say Jet or Grizzly... a lot of them are made in "export areas" made by makers who knows there's no market for the stuff in Taiwan so they are export only. Any Taiwanese who wants them have to pay a premium for them.

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Cat-gut strings are made from kitten guts, stretched out to near breaking point and then hardened with grue saliva. As a result these give a feeling of Pain and anguish whenever played, and often end up playing themselves backwards as part of satanic rituals.

Typhoon Guitars
http://www.typhoon-guitars.com

You can use it to sand stuff. Like headstocks, and other stuffs.


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http://www.CostaGuitars.com
PMoMC