Black Walnut Back and Sides

[Kim Hillard]

My first guitar build.
Back and Sides - Black Walnut
Top and Braces - Torrified Sitka
Neck - Curly Maple and Black Walnut
Fretboard and Heel Plate - Ebony
Binding - Cherry
Rosette - Black Walnut and Curly Maple
Peg Head Veneer - Walnut with Curly Maple stripe and Oak Root Inlays
Purfling - Black - White - Black
Bridge and Pick Guard - Black Walnut
End Flash - Cherry
Bridge Pins and End Pin - Hand turned American White Ebony (Persimmon)
Bridge Plate - Persimmon
Finish - TruOil

[Jim Ebert]

Nice looking guitar. Any advice on bridge pin turning would be awesome. Thanks in advance,
Jim

[John Parchem]

Really nice looking guitar. I like the inlays and the rosette a lot. Your guitar is so nicely put together including the hand turned bridge pins, have you done a lot of wood working?

[Kim Hillard]

John, thank you for the nice comments. The oak root inlays were a fun experiment. The root slices had to be turned round on my lathe to the size of hole I drilled into the peghead inlay say 3/4". That piece was then glued and clamped into that drilled hole. Then I would drill some overlapping hole/s to make it all look random. I have used the oak root inlays in other non-guitar projects. I especially like the 3D "beach ball" effect they have. All of the position markers on top of the fret board are also 1/4" oak root inlays as well.

I have done quite a bit of working and this project just seemed like a natural evolution of my hobby. I must say I had to get my head around the close tolerances one must pay attention to during the build. 0.xxxx" (4 digits to the right of the decimal point) for fret slot cutting made me a bit giddy.


Jim, thank you as well. Regarding turning bridge pins...I apparently had too much time on my hands and this perverse notion that "these shouldn't be that hard." And once I figured it out it really wasn't that difficult.
One of the first things you have to deal with is turning the taper to exactly match the tapered hole you will ream into the bridge and bridge plate.
I began the turning process with a blank of whatever material I was experimenting with and turned the taper first. I have a little old metal lathe that can be set to turn a taper but I have other ideas of how they can be done without that kind of lathe.

I started out trying out several different materials.
First up was the traditional black Ebony which I quickly moved away from, although it does turn up nicely and it polishes very well, it was too brittle for my tastes.
Next up to bat was bone. I had a lot cow femur left over from making my nut and saddle but that too became troublesome in finding enough bone thick enough for the pins. And it smells up the shop.
Michigan has a bunch of Whitetail deer hunters and antlers are found at every flea market so I had my pick of antler material. Turns out that much of the horn is quite porous and the colors change from bone white to purple etc.
Finally I landed on my hoard of Persimmon. Now Persimmon (if you've not heard of it) is a true American Ebony. It is a white ebony with some dark streaking at times. It grows in Michigan and has an edible fruit that has a delicate sweet flavor. Back in the day (mid 1800's) America exported persimmon wood to Scotland so they could build golf club heads. So it is really Very Hard Stuff.
But I digress.

So now having this short blank of round material say 2 inches long with a taper on one end (Seems like it is a 5 degree taper) I moved over to my wood lathe.
I created a little hardwood disk (call it the pin chuck) roughly 3 " in dia. and roughly 1" thick. Chucked this up in my scroll chuck and center drilled a hole sized to match the small dial of the tapered end of the blank.
Then I reamed this hole out with the bridge hole reamer. I now had a little jamb chuck that would hold the taper end of the pin by just tapping it into the pin chuck and I could start to turn the ball end with out holding both ends of the material.
Here comes the magic. I took and old file and used a little cutoff wheel in a Dremel and carved a Pin head profile with a little back cut so the top edge of the profile was sharp and used this tool to scrape the ball head and lip. A little sanding and they buffed up pretty as a picture.

I hope this will help.

[Daniel P]

Love your bridge pins.

I have a smal Sherline lathe at home, and keep thinking about turning my own pins. I need to look into making one of those profiling cutters for the bridge pins. So very cool.

[Kim Hillard]

Daniel, yes for the cost of an old nasty file...doesn't everyone have one or many?... and 15-20 minutes with a Dremel you can be rolling your own Pins. I just eyeballed the end pin that is shown.

[Jim Ebert]

That's far out Kim. Some how I imagined something kinda like the file thing but it was just some kind of fogging vision that i really hadn't figured out. Having you show your method, really lifted the fog. I've always wanted a small metal lath and I sometimes cruise Craig's list for them, now i have a better reason to step up my search. Do you think it would work to do the tapered end and the ball end using the same method as just the ball end?
Thanks so much for this. You get a gold star for today