Official Luthiers Forum!

Last week MLW and I spent our Anniversary (44) in the Hudson Valley below Albany. Peak leaf color and good weather and lots of site seeing. We took a nice long ride on the Hudson on our sailboat which is at my brother's house in the area. A fine time was had by all.

We visited a hardware store in Hudson NY that has been there since 1832 and has NOS hardware and tools everywhere - as an example they recently bought 8,000 dozen (100,000 units) of a certain discontinued file and sold a lot of them to Lee Valley for their catalog.

I had a chance to spend time with the current proprietor of this 1832 business. He took me up to his shop on the second of 3 floors and boy is he set up. Old and heavy wood and metal working machines in abundance, NOS hand tools hanging everywhere.

Because I had shown interest in rasps and files, he wanted to show me a certain file. He grabbed a piece of apple in the big vise and filed the rough endgrain with this file, and it was ready for finish!! Remarkable. I bought one thinking it would have an application in making necks, among other things.

It is a milled tooth file (not a mill cut file). Milled tooth means the teeth are cut by a milling machine, not by a chisel. These teeth are cut in a wave pattern to make them more random in how the wood sees them:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruby1638/22302906655/in/dateposted-public/

Works like a charm.

Then I noticed box after box after box of Grobet rifflers and other shapes in all styles and sizes. I recalled a recent thread where someone said that Grobet had recently stopped offering a certain file but couldn't remember which (turns out it is nut slotting files), so I asked if he minded if people contacted him about specific needs. He said no problem.

Let me know if you want his info.

Ed

When I was a kid, 18 years old or there abouts, I worked in a very old time hardware store just like that in Connecticut. It was a blast. I loved that place. There was all kinds of stuff in the storage attic and relic equipment and you could pretty much buy anything that was ever made there. Nice memories...