Acoustic Guitar Construction

KIS ---- several #64 rubber bands will work fine. The spring on one of my drill presses broke and that's how my spindle return has worked for about six years now -- you will have to replace the bands occasionally.

I did that, here it is hard at work. I have a friend who is a gun smith and he did it for me on his lathe.

Mine is a fairly cheap Palmgren arbor press from Enco and it came with a punch set so it already had a hole in the column and a magnet to hold the punch. The hole was a bit bigger than the shank of the StewMac cauls so I just needed a bushing around the shank, and the magnet is strong enough to hold it in but I can easily switch back to a punch. I used a little bungee for a spring return and I attached a socket on the other side of the shaft so I can plug in a torque wrench to press in every fret with the same force, works nice.



Edit: I realize using exactly the "same force" on every fret may be less than perfect as the fretboard changes in width, but I think that's a relatively minor variation compared to my first attempts without the torque wrench where I either under-seated them or crushed the wood. I just adjust it to seat the frets well in the middle of the range and it seems to work fine across the board.

Jay, Mr. Goldberg would be proud of you...and the torque setting is.....? (yes, I know, 'enough', but maybe a starting number?)

Thanks very much.

Clever use of the torque wrench!

The resulting force will depend on the diameter of the pinion gear in your press but as a starting point, my torque wrench is set at 35 ft-lbs or 5.5 M-Kgs and that seems to work well for me. I don't know the diameter of my pinion gear but I think mine is a 1-ton press, which I'm pretty sure would be enough to cut a fretboard in half but I bought the bigger press thinking I might have other uses for it.

I've not drilled any heavy metal with my drill press. What is the procedure/type of bit, oil etc that I need to consider in order to make the 1/2 ton arbor work?