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I've made a bunch of lutherie-specific tools, rosette cutter, Fox bender, digital heat blanket controller, plate joiner. Saved a bunch of cash, spent a lot of time doing it. If time spent enters the discussion about build/buy, if cash is available, I'd say 'buy'. I had quite a delay building guitars while I was building tools.

I have a cheap 14" band saw and a great 19x38 drum sander. I don't miss my planer at all.

You don't really need a planer (surface planer?) for guitar work. If you can re-saw boards for backs, tops and sides, then they just need sanding. I build 1 to 1-1/2 a year and my local cabinetmaker friend charges me $20 to put everything through his 4 foot wide, 20 HP, 3hp belt feed motor tool. Funny to watch ukulele sides at .055 going through this enormous machine.

For the last 15 years I have helped perhaps 12 friends and acquaintances liquidate their shops. The single tool that is the hardest to sell is the ShopSmith, that funky tool that is a lathe, bandsaw, table saw, jigsaw, and everything else you are foolish enough to buy the attachment for. We have had to give them away for $100 at times, because they do everything OK but nothing really well.

As has been said, buy good tools, or maybe rent someone else's time on their machine if you don't build a lot.

Ed

See viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7772&p=42396&hilit=thickness+sander#p42396

If you have any questions, I'll try to answer them. Yes, it's my own design, assisted with a liberal amount of idea theft from other plans I found online. My old engineering prof would occasionally say, "robbery was man' s first labor-saving device."

My original hobby interest was machine shop stuff, building model steam engines from castings and such, so I had the equipment (lathe and milling machine) and skillset to build the thickness sander.