Investing in nice tools. Where do you shop?

[KaiserSoze]

I'm planning on dropping some money on nice tools for basic work for myself and others.  Who do you like for tools necessary for fret and nut work and also general shop tools and measuring devices?
 
The most obvious is Stewmac but that may not be the best place to get stuff.  A lot of their tools seem overpriced but my intent is to use good tools and I'm willing to pay a bit more for them.

Thanks all.

 

[rapfohl09]

In my opinion if you are willing to invest some money in tools that you want to work well Stewmac is the way to go. Are they expensive? Hell yes, but do they do what they say they are going to do very well? Hell yes, at least in my experience. Everything that I have thrown down the money for and gotten from there has been perfect.

The "problem" with Stewmac tools is that 90% of everyone I have ever seen that wanted to build there own guitars, either from Warmoth parts (honestly surprised that this doesn't come up that much here, but anyone I have ever turned onto Warmoth has been this way) or from pieces of lumber always has one thing in mind. They want everything to be incredibly amazing, and they want to pay basically nothing for it. It is understandable, getting together the tools to put together instruments is ridiculously expensive. I used to keep a tally of what I had spent over the 5 or so years that I have been into it, needless to say I had to stop because it was literally making my head want to explode. I have tried to find cheap ebay alternatives and sometimes you really can find some good stuff. Like there is a slotted straight edge on ebay for checking if the fretboard is level when it has frets in it already. Ebay -> 20ish dollars, Stewmac -> 75ish dollars. Howevever, there are also a lot of things on ebay that are just garbage, and I spent more money because I bought the garbage, then ended up buying the good stuff.

So sorry this is a huge answer, but you have already done yourself a great service and decided that you might end up spending some money on this stuff, but you know what, you will be that much happier with what you get out of it. I think Stewmac has a great selection, and if you are serious about working on guitars, after working on a few they will be worth what you paid for them.

Also, LMII.com is a good source for great tools, and my diamond in the rough on ebay has always been the seller universal_jems

 

[SustainerPlayer]

Except from eBay - which I haven't used in years - I will second rapfohl09.

I also bought from Rockinger.de and some others which are only of interest if you are in the EU.

I use StewMac as a reference and try to find some of it cheaper in my local stores too. But most of the more specialized stuff you can't get here anyway.

Some also take pride and interest in building their own tools. And I can understand that. But for me the focus is on the guitar-stuff. So I don't mind I sometime pay premium for things that I might I gotten cheaper/made myself. Cause I rather spend my time working on the guitars instead.

 

[bagman67]

I am not a gun enthusiast, but I have heard tell from some of our brothers and sisters in guitar building/customization who are that certain gunsmith specialty tools happen to be very well suited to guitar tweakery, and at better prices than equivalent tools marketed to lutherie nerds.

 

[sixstringsamurai]

I am not a gun enthusiast, but I have heard tell from some of our brothers and sisters in guitar building/customization who are that certain gunsmith specialty tools happen to be very well suited to guitar tweakery, and at better prices than equivalent tools marketed to lutherie nerds.

Very true.
My Brownells account gets more use than my Stew mac as far as tools and finishing supplies go.
I also find odds and ends along the way that suffice for multiple uses if you think outside the box.

 

[Cagey]

I'm planning on dropping some money on nice tools for basic work for myself and others.  Who do you like for tools necessary for fret and nut work and also general shop tools and measuring devices?
 
The most obvious is Stewmac but that may not be the best place to get stuff.  A lot of their tools seem overpriced but my intent is to use good tools and I'm willing to pay a bit more for them.

StewMac seems expensive sometimes, and sometimes they are. But, some of the stuff they sell is pretty unique. No other industry needs those particular tools, so there's no economy of scale in their manufacture. For instance, a diamond fret crowning file has exactly one use - crowning frets. So, how many of those do you suppose they make per year? Same is true of nut spacing rules, nut files, string height gauges, etc. StewMac doesn't make any of that stuff, so they job it out. Doing it that way, they almost certainly have to buy a pile of them to get them made at all. So, big investment on their part + slow turnover = high price. If they don't mark it up heavily, they may as well just dump their money into passbook savings accounts. This is true of any reseller.

Some stuff is re-purposed, but still expensive through no fault of their own. For instance, their diamond fret levelling files are just DiaSharp bench stones used primarily as wood chisel and planer blade sharpeners. You can find them other places, but they're still expensive. It's a precision tool with some pricey material and procedures involved with its manufacture. I know of several places to get them, but you won't save much. They're just expensive tools, and that's all there is to it. Stewie isn't trying to rape you; they're just making something useful available.

LMII is a good place to get tools, but their selection seems to be smaller. No less expensive. They seem to be more into supplies and raw materials.

Ebay sometimes has some good deals, but you gotta watch those rascals close. Still, I've gotten some good stuff there.

Sometimes you can re-purpose tools from other professions like gun and jewelry smithing for your metalworking needs. Of course, the woodworking tools are almost limitless in their variety, so manufacturers/vendors are many and varied.

Past those few, there aren't a lot of sources. Luthier tools just don't present a large enough market for competition to really kick in and have an effect.

 

[Orpheo]

you can't get around getting stuff from stewmac. those guys have so much. For instance, the Fretrocker is bloody brilliant. But I make most of my own jigs and I have very little use for what they offer. for the most part.

 

[KaiserSoze]

Cool advice all.  Thank you.  I'm a "buy one good tool rather than four bad ones" kind of guy anyway.  I just wanted to see if there were any other retailers to be aware of.  Now I just need some inexpensive necks to practice fretwork on.

 

[Jumble Jumble]

Put it this way: price is the only reason not to just get everything from StewMac. If money was no object there'd really be no reason not to just buy one of everything. The quality of the tools is good, they do what they say, the service is good, and so on.

 

[greywolf]

Stew mac for some , there is a great woodworker centric store here in the ATL called Highlands Hardware that is the bomb for anything in that vein

 

[Cagey]

I've done some business with Highland. Good stuff. Helluva file collection. I got a set of ceramic sharpening stones...

... from them that are great for making small repairs to frets, removing saddle burrs, etc. as they leave an almost polished surface that doesn't need any further attention.

 

[stubhead]

I like Stew-Max for their catalog. And once I see something, I find a better place to buy it, or make it myself. If you take a piece of 1" X 2" pine, drill a 1/4" hole through it lengthwise and further along, a 3/16th hole. Then saw through the holes, and you have a piece of wood with a channel on each end. Saw or belt-sand the wood up to the channel, glue a strip of inner-tube rubber in there (silicone baking sheet would be OK...).  You now have a fret-crowning tool that will use every single available grit of wet/dry sandpaper. And $90 left in the bank. I had a friend who went through the lutherie program at Southwest Tech college (MN) and they got a few things from LMII - like, their convex needle file will do four of the nut slots, if you can pay attention. They also had a few of the large Stew-Mac jigs and stuff, if you're really planning on doing some production work the Stew-Mac stuff is great. But I've picked up a lifetime supply of needle files at garage sales, I live in an area with lots of gunsmithing and duck carving..

All this gets to,
YOUR BRAIN, AND HOW YOU TRAIN IT,  IS THE MOST IMPORTANT TOOL.

You look at a chunk of stuff, you know exactly what you want it to be, then you make it be that.

 

[sixstringsamurai]

If you take a piece of 1" X 2" pine, drill a 1/4" hole through it lengthwise and further along, a 3/16th hole. Then saw through the holes, and you have a piece of wood with a channel on each end. Saw or belt-sand the wood up to the channel, glue a strip of inner-tube rubber in there (silicone baking sheet would be OK...).  You now have a fret-crowning tool that will use every single available grit of wet/dry sandpaper. And $90 left in the bank.

Pics? I get what you're saying, but I would really like to see the end product.

 

[stubhead]

I got a picture here somewhere... in the meantime here's something else:


It's two sheets of plastic, like credit card or thermo-pak plastic. And two sticks. One of the sticks has rubber glued to it, one has a piece of thin mousepad - useful for sanding when your fingertips don't want to take the bullet. But that's not what they're doing right now.

When you're working on a nut, but you'd rather take it out of the slot for safety, efficiency etc. -
you put the two sheets of plastic under the strings, snuggied up to the nut - then you slide the stick up towards the nut, in-between the sheets of plastic:



The clear sheet is kinda invisible there, but it's on top of the stick and under the strings, you can see how eagerly the nut leaps out... try and find THAT one in StewMackie... heh heh.

 

[Jumble Jumble]

I think they want you to use these:

$9.95 a pair, which is one of their less offensive prices.

 

[stubhead]

And that's exactly what I mean - you look at their catalog, then - make some! If you're either a responsible collector of re-purposed materiel, or an obsessive/compulsive disgusting hoardy little packrat, your junkbox and/or materiel collection matrices already have about three things in 'em that could make Stewie Max' little hairpin bobby roller type curved thingamawhatists - fo free! Or as you're then ridding the world of dangerous "clutter", it's actually even socially responsible! Whew - enough work for this month. :headbang1:

 

[Jumble Jumble]

Let's say, for example, that there's something I can buy from StewMac for $10, that I could make myself in an hour. I still have to decide whether I would rather have the $10 or the hour. Or to put it another way, is an hour worth $10 to me? I charge my own time out at way, way more than $10/hr. In fact at today's exchange rate it's more or less exactly ten times that. Now, that's not to say that I would charge myself that same amount of money, but I am quite happy to spend $10 to claim back an hour of time.

I think it's always worth weighing stuff up like that. Just because you haven't spent any actual cash on something doesn't mean you got it for nothing. It's very different for me, too, as I don't have a workshop at all, so there are some things I literally can't make. I don't even have space for a drill press so I can't even make a hole that I know is at a 90° angle to the surface I'm drilling into. That sort of limitation leads to:

1. some rather creative solutions
2. paying people to do things that I could, in theory at least, do myself