MIMF

Does anyone have any plans for a tuner peg cutter? Thanks.

Jason,

Violin pegs are not simple constructs. There's the simple part about making tapered pegs that do the job of tightening the strings but there's also the knob that the hand and fingers turn. I think that a competent person with a pocketknife could do the entire thing, but I'm sure that I couldn't produce any elegant results in a useful amount of time. How would you break down the process into several manageable asks? I'd bet that a smart guy with a good lathe could do most if not all of the machining.

Most homemade and commercial rigs I've seen have a tapered hole with an adjustable blade, along the lines of most handheld pencil sharpeners. Create a tapered hole in a block of wood with a tapered reamer, plane/cut off the top of the block, and mount the blade parallel to the taper so that it slowly shaves your pin down to the correct taper.

Another possibility for you... I haven't tried this method, but if you already have a peg hole reamer of the proper taper it wouldn't take much effort/investment to give this a try... google "how to shape violin pegs with homemade shaper, stop slipping + youtube". You'll find a video posted by a chap who goes by smellyoldfatguy.

Maybe start out by turning the peg body/head on a lathe, rough out the taper oversized, and then work it down to the finished taper with smellyoldfatguy's method?

If you give it a try, please post your results. Good luck!

There was a posting over at ANZLF regarding one

http://www.anzlf.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=5541
May be what you're looking for
John

I built one almost the same, but I would caution you to ignore what that site says about using any piece of junk wood. I have split a couple blocks of junk wood from the pressure of turning the peg. Use a good piece of hardwood, and make the higher side a little higher to give good support over top of the peg.

Jim McConkey wrote: but I would caution you to ignore what that site says about using any piece of junk wood.

Hmmm... I did not suggest to use any piece of junk wood! I just wrote that you can make it for "the price of a junk of wood [...]" - which in my case was a piece of nice flamed maple that I had to glue up in two layers:

I think the word is chunk

I made a halfhearted attempt at making one of these once but smaller to shave bridge pins. I could never get the flat surface that the blade sits on quite right. I kept missing the apex of the cone on the front (larger diameter side) or back (smaller diameter side). I'm sure there is a trick for laying it out that will make me feel dumb for not thinking of it. So go ahead guys make me feel dumb <g>

You're correct Bryan, halfhearted won't do the trick.

First I had finished the conical hole (without the "entrance chamfer"). Then I set a marking gouge to the apex of each side of the conical hole and scribed the two lines to the far end of the block. With these lines scribed one should already make the entrance chamfer. The next step was doing first the vertical (short) cut into the hole, and then the second cut at a distance of about 1 mm parallel to the two scribed lines (I used a Kataba, but a western style saw will be OK too, of course). At last I chiseled off the remaining thickness down to the scribed lines, and then a bit further until the hole was evenly opened, which almost automatically will start to happen about 0.5mm below the apex. Don't use a too broad chisel, anything from 12 to 20 mm wide will be fine, advancing gradually and methodically.