If you don't have a thickness sander, how do you...........?

[naccoachbob]

I don't have one, and I need to thickness my headstock, some veneers I have, and other things that come up here and there.
How do YOU do these things without one?
I have a belt/disk sander, but the belt part stopped working for no reason that I can find. I can see putting up a fence and using it.
I have a drill press, but only a 3" drum on it, nothing bigger. Any ideas where to find one that's 4" or so?
I'm planning on putting an ebony veneer on the top of the headstock, and cocobolo on the back, so the headstock will have to be shrunk a bit. Each of those veneers are about 1/8" thick, so they need to come down some as well.
Thanks for your thoughts,
Bob

For something that size I'd try a scraper.

-tommy

[Ben-Had]

Can you get your hands on a safe-t-planer? That's what I use to get it close for final sanding.

[naccoachbob]

It seems the man who made the Wagner Safe-T Planer retired and folded up shop. However, I found this drill press safety planer which looks almost identical at first glance.
http://woodworker.com/fullpres.asp?PART ... RGEVIEW=ON
The price is right, so I might buy it.
While researching the above, I read where some people just use a router and a couple of blocks of wood just like you might use to rout out for an inlay on a fretboard if you didn't want to deal with the radius.
Thanks,

[Kevin Sjostrand]

Bob,
I have the knock off safety planer and I have used it to thickness the back of the headstock. It works although it might scare you a little the first time you use it. Honestly, the drum sander in the drill press with the fence is really the way to go. You have lots of control over the process. I have not found a longer than 3" drum sander yet, but since my headstock at the widest point is right at 3" I can make the robo sander work. I have just a little bit to knock off with the hand plane, chisel and sanding block. It is also a great way to form a nice shaped volute. Give it a try on some practice pine and see how it goes....you can make a simple fence for your drill press table that you can move a little at a time closer to the drum as you sand away to your final thickness. Did you see how I attached a piece to the front of the headstock to help give it more surface area to rest on so you can keep it perpendicular to the drum and flat against the fence?

Kevin

[B. Howard]

I use a well tuned and sharpened bench plane and a scraper.

[Alan Carruth]

That new version of the safety planer should work well, but may have one or two issues. I actually ran into these when I bought a replacement Wagner some years ago, and had problems with it that I had not had with the original.

Planers of this type rely on having all three cutters at exactly the same height. If one is cutting more or less than the others by any significant amount, the thing will tend to throw wood around the shop, which is exciting, but not useful. The problems I had with my replacement unit seemed to stem from an effort to reduce the manufacturing time a bit, which lead to inaccuracies creeping in.

One change was that, rather than mill out the bottoms of the pockets to ensure that they were really flat, they simply relied on the quality of the investment casting. These were good castings, and not very far off, but it doesn't take much.

The other change was that the cutters were not centerless ground to be flat after they were heat treated. Often parts will warp in heat treatment, and these were somewhat out of flat.

Either of these omissions by itself might not have caused a problem, but the combination of the two certainly did! In use the non-flat cutter would not seat well in the non-flat pocket, and as soon as you tried to use it the cutter would rotate to some more 'comfortable' position, throwing the alignment of the edges out of whack. The cutters are, of course, mounted at a slight angle so that the edges are at the lowest point, and when one of them rotates it's no longer cutting, and the thing tosses yuor wood across the shop.

It was easy enough to scrape out the bottom of the pockets with a chisel; aluminum is pretty soft. The cutters I lapped flat on a diamond sharpening stone, although you could also use sandpaper on a surface plate or a piece of thick glass. Make sure the cutters all end up the same thickness, too! Once I'd done that, the new tool worked as wll as the old one ever had.

[naccoachbob]

Thanks for all the input. I have a belt/disk sander, but the belt sander side of it had quit on me. I just found out why. The drive belt for it had broken. I've got one coming Monday.
I saw a jig made up to do this precise operation on a belt sander somewhere on one of the guitar building forums. I'm going to look for it and try to emulate it.
I'm also going to try the method Kevin used as well, with the drill press. My headstock will probably not be more than 3" wide - once I figure out what it's going to look like.
Brian, I also have a block plane, and a smaller plane. I'm going to study how to tune those planes, work around on some pine around here, and see if I can get good enough with it to work the headstock. So that's three ways to kill this bird.
I'm just deciding how happy I am about getting further away from strict "kits", and doing more and more of the work myself. I get bored with hobbies after a time, but learning to build guitars and learning to play guitars is a hobby that is so intricate, with so much variation, that it will take the rest of my life to get to that bored state. And I'm glad of that!!
Alan, thanks for that advice. I just watched Robbie O'Brien's video on sharpening, and one point he made was "if you spend a little, you have to do more work" to get the tool set up properly. That sounds the case with the Safe-T-Planer now.

[naccoachbob]

If anyone has pictures of a belt sander jig, please post as many as you have. I can't seem to find much anywhere I look.
Thanks,
Bob