About a year and a half ago, I was packing up everything I own to move to my new house.
While I was packing I found a handful of guitar pick necklaces that I had made years ago. This reignited something in me and made me want to make more of them.
The problem was that I was more than a little busy at the time and I needed to setup a whole new workshop before I could get started.
Side note: I hope to have a post about my new workshop soon!
Fast forward to this past summer when I finally was able to start working on them.
I scoured my wood stash for small cutoffs, turning blanks, and any other small pieces of wood that I knew would make a beautiful pick necklace.
Now, for this adventure I wasn’t really thinking about making playable picks. I was thinking about woods that would make great necklaces. Most of them do actually turn out to be playable, but that wasn’t what I was necessarily going for.
In my search, I separated the pieces into a few different piles. One for now, one for the next batch, one for the next next batch, etc.
So, my first pile consisted of African Blackwood, Purpleheart, Myrtle Burl, Olive wood, Koa, and Walnut. Then Shawn May (May Custom Basses) offered to send me some of his cutoffs, so I added in a couple of those – Pink Ivory and Mun Ebony. I’m saving the rest of what he gave me in my future pick piles.
So then I was on a quest to figure out the best way for myself to make these in large quantities. I searched youtube and most people are using CNC machines to make theirs.
The first time I made these, I used a jeweler’s saw and just slowly cut them out one by one and sanded them by hand. I wasn’t about to go with that method this time. And I don’t have a CNC, so I had to figure out a middle ground.
After trying different methods I ended up using a combination of two bandsaws, a disc sander, a drill press, a 2″ sanding mandrel, a random orbital sander, a sanding block, and my hands.
It ended up being way more of a process than I was initially thinking it would be. I might have chosen too many pieces of wood to work with for this first batch! I think I might just add in 1 or 2 at a time in the future instead of doing the large batch method.
Picks are tiny little things when it comes to power tools or even just block sanding. So, I made adjustments to everything I did to make it work safely and efficiently.
For instance, I made up a simple push block to use while re-sawing the wood on the bandsaw. The small pieces of wood are double-stick taped to the side of the block and run against the bandsaw fence. This allows me to re-saw small pieces and keep my hands away from the blade.
I also had to make a new table insert for the bandsaw so the thinner pieces of wood wouldn’t get pulled down into the gap around the blade.
I do feel like I spent more time figuring the whole process out than I have spent on actually making them. Thankfully, I have the process down now. I just wish I had some sort of mini random orbital sander to help me out with sanding! The 2″ sanding mandrel leaves too many sanding scratches for me to do the fine sanding with.
Here are some of the finished pieces.
You can find these, as well as any available guitars or basses in my shop.
Thanks for looking. Stay tuned!
