Luthier's Friend Sanding Station

I have already used this handy device more than I had anticipated. I got the sliding vice as well. It makes the initial shaping of nuts and saddles a breeze. Recommended!

I thought this would be the answer to dust-free shaping of nuts and saddles and to custom-thicknessed veneers for rosettes, but I have not found it useful so far. It may be that my drill press is too sloppy to work well with it - I have been using without problem (except for a switch that needed replacing) since 1972. It drill holes well, but gives bumpy results with the sanding station. I am not quite up to spending a thousand or two more dollars to see if I can make my $200 sanding station work.

This tool has easily quartered the time I used to spend roughing-out nuts and saddles. Great time and money saver!

I've struggled with this tool off and on for months and finally hung it on the wall. Then I read the review about the sliding vise not being square with itself.Mine too is way, way off. Also don't assume that the fence is 90 degrees to the table. I use paper shims to square it up.

I used to sand thickness and flatness small parts by passing the piece over sandpaper stuck to a flat plate. I would sand, measure, adjust sand, measure, again and again (I did get pretty good at it). I used this little gem of a tool in my drill press to thickness-sand a maple bridge plate blank to .090 thick. I was amazed; a few passes and it was within 0.001", length and width. Perfect tool for any shop.

So far I have used the Luthier's Friend Sanding Station for nuts and saddles and it makes sizing much easier and saves me lots of time. This is a must have for all Luthiers as time and precision means money and perfection.

This tool was just OK for me. It's really just a mini drum sander on it's side. If you have the space, a real drum sander does a much better job. If you don't, it's a good set up to have.

I should have bought this sooner. I was undecided for several months trying to justify the cost verses the few times I might use it. A couple of StewMac gift certificates given to me as birthday presents finally made my mind up. Truth is I have found so many more ways to use this sanding station than I could ever have imagined. The quality of the tool was much higher than I anticipated from viewing the pictures. Great accuracy is easily achieved if you follow the instructions to ensure the fence is truly parallel to the sanding sleeve and don't try to sand too deeply at each pass. I have sanded mahogany, maple, rosewood and ebony all with excellent results. I have also tried it to thickness ivoroid and by using the finest grade sanding sleeve with a small depth of cut managed to get a very consistent thickness tolerance. This is now one of the most prized tools in my workshop.

This is such a great device for thicknessing the face of strat style headstocks and the like. However, there isn't enough sanding height for thicknessing the rear of headstocks that have wings/sides (e.g. PRS style among many others) which would be really helpful, especially for shaping a volute at the same time.

I put off buying this for a long while as I wasn't sure it would do what I wanted. I was looking for a method of bringing sheet and strip wood to size cleanly after cutting on a bandsaw. I think I will use it all the time now- immediately after preparing timber on my bandsaw. I can go straight to the Sanding Sation which is permanently installed on a pillar drill and sand to finish size. The adjustable fence is very accurate and I find I'm finishing down to tenths of a millimeter measured with a vernier. I hope it bears up to a lot of use; I've only had it a few weeks but I can't see much to go wrong.