Ten Sanders And A Lot Of Hand Sanding

We pretty regularly get requests to do special inlays or custom tone holes on instruments, and we love doing it. So this week, one of my projects was to do an inlay into an ebony flat head. You can see the image below.

Head with inlay. I've wiped it with naphtha oil to clean off sawdust and make it look like it will when we get around to putting our clear lacquer on it.

This little part got me thinking - with just this one piece, I've already used 3 different sanders... for a full instrument, I use 10 different sanders!

Down one wall in our shop you can see a selection of our sanders - an edge sander, a vertical sander, a couple of balloon sanders, an oscillating edge sander...

None of the sanders are used much, but I'm switching between them depending on what I need. But then, when I get close to the end of an instrument, it comes down to me with a piece of sandpaper and a scraper. Each instrument has about an hour and a half of hand sanding!

Here I am using a razor blade to scrape into the tight joint of the head. I'm needing to be very careful since I normally use two hands, but I'm using one to take a picture here!