These next few posts will be showing the process of making multiple tools. It is my hope that by doing these project posts individually, I will be able to go into much more detail & and hopefully it’ll also be easier to look up in the future as well!

Before we are able to get our hands on an instrument for repair, we must first be familiar with what we have in the shop. While we do have thousands of dollars worth of tools at our disposal, repair techs will still fashion materials into extremely useful and versatile instruments for repair.

The Poker

The first project we made in class was known as: The Poker. This tool is just a saxophone needle spring in 3 inches of delrin rod (1/2″ diameter), but make no mistake; there are hundreds of practical applications for this tool.

This project was also my introduction to using a bench motor. The first part of any project, aside from gathering materials, is to “face the stock,” which means we file down the edges to eliminate the potentially sharp or jagged edge. While holding the mill file firmly, the proper angles are: 45º, 10º vertical, & 10º horizontal.

After facing, we create the taper where the spring will eventually go. After we finish prepping the delrin rod, we grind the spring on the backside to make easier to insert to the delrin (we drilled a hole carefully in the middle).

The end result should look like this:

If your first poker isn’t completely straight, that’s alright! I, as well as many adjacent peers, had difficulty with this step. There will be plenty of time in the future to make more tools like this one!

The repair tech journey has officially begun! Next post will be about working with flames, my experience soldering, & a few new tools such as The Porting Tool!

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