Making a Truly Flat Sanding Bar

by Mark French

Originally published in American Lutherie #113, 2013



As any luthier knows, a flat sanding bar is an indispensable tool. Buying one can be expensive, but making one isn’t as hard as you might think. It is not difficult to use strips of sandpaper to sand rectangular aluminum tube or bar stock to an extremely flat condition.

To start, I should be clear that I like using 3˝ sanding bars, which are wider than many of those commercially available. They are handy for a number of tasks, especially ensuring that necks and fretboards are flat before gluing them together. They are a nice alternative to a heavy granite surface plate and are much easier to tuck away when not needed. Certainly, narrower ones can be more useful for leveling frets, and they can also be made using the process described here.