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Continuing on the trend of making highly specialized luthier tools with whatever I have lying around, I made a thickness gauge! It's a piece of oak, cut in the shape of a lyre because I wanted it to be more than just a plain [ bracket shape (and the whole thing with Apollo's lyre and god of music and all that, it's symbolic as well as practical), with a cheap but accurate digital caliper I had, some brass screws, rubber band, and a couple of burnt LEDs for the tips! I considered putting a little lever on it but it's really easy to raise the measuring bit the way it is with a thumb or just pulling on it so I think I'll just leave it as it is, since it's working just fine.

I'm gonna be opening up a violin in the near future as I continue my journey learning to service them, and then I realized, I'm going to need some spool clamps to close it back up! So I made some, with a long dowel I had lying around, some cork mats, and a bunch of 4-inch carriage bolts and wing-nuts, those last two I got on eBay for $10 for bags of 25, surprisingly not from China! I started by chopping up the dowel into a bunch of equally-sized pieces, then glued them to the cork, waited a couple of days for the glue to fully dry, cut them all out with a band-saw, refined the shape with the belt sander, drilled a hole through them, threaded the screws, and voila! If I ever make more of these I actually would do it different, though. My method proved to be more labor-intensive than I predicted. Next time I would glue a flat piece of wood of the right thickness to the cork, then use a hole saw to drill/cut them out at same time. I can't wait to get to use them!