Making wood guitar picks

Sleipner Guitars, handbuilt guitars and basses, custom guitar, guitar and bass parts,
guitar woods, Swing Guitars, Swing basses, Swing pickups, etc.

Wood species for Sleipner wood guitar pick

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Sleipner Guitars will close in the end of December 2008. Sleipner will
therefore sell out all of it's stock to reduced prices. Check out
our sales << here >>

Intro to wood guitar picks • Wood picks for sale • Info on wood species • How the picks are made

A lot of work goes into the production of the Sleipner wood guitar picks, and it starts with finding the right woods. As I have been making knives now and then, I have a lot of offcuts that I use. The offcuts are not big, but they work excellent for wood guitar picks and small earrings etc (that my wife makes).

The wood picks starts as thin slices of wood (about 3 mm in thickness) that are done on a trusty bandsaw.

Then the wood slices are sanded to the right thickness on my home built drum sander. No images on this step, but the sander can bee seen in the background of the last picture.

The next step is to cut them out with a scrollsaw (no images from this step).

Then it's time to sand them to the wanted outline on a small disc sander. The pick that I am working on is a cocobolo pick.

Then I taper/round over the edges so the pick glides smoothly over the strings. This also involves a lot of hand filing and sanding before they are polish.

Here i'm working with the filing. When they are polished, I don't polish the flats any more, just the edges (this was a request from many customers as the sanded surface gives a better grip on the picks).

The wood picks are finally packed and labelled in bags, ready to go out to customers from all over the world.

Picks in various stages of production. Some of the wood species in the picture are; Lignum Vitae, Pink Ivory, Snakewood, Cocobolo, Mexican Kingwood, Ebony, Macassar Ebony.