Brass Guitar Picks

Brass guitar picks are probably not going to be a product I will be offering in my shop any time soon, but making them certainly helped me advance my metal working skills a little.

My hubby plays the guitar, and I wanted to surprise him on his return from a business trip. My original idea was to make a guitar pick and engrave my darling´s name on it, but further down in this post you will see why I decided to leave the finished pick plain in the end.

First of all, I grabbed one of my hubby´s plastic guitar picks and drew its outline on a piece of paper. That, I cut out and glued it onto a 20 gauge brass sheet. The next step was sawing it out with a hand saw. Once that was done, I simply rubbed the paper stencil off under running water. So far, so good!

Given that the raw pick had rather sharp, irregular edges, some sanding and polishing was necessary. This gave me the opportunity to try out my new rotary tool by Dremel. I started with the roughest sanding wheel and worked myself down to finer bits from there. I also wanted to round the edges off so they were less thick than the center of the pick.

I was quite pleased with the end result. Only the surface of the pick needed some polishing to get rid of the traces the work process had left on it.

And now the frustrating bit: working with the engraver apparently requires practice, because my attempts at writing even one single letter came out miserable. I just couldn´t figure out how to deal with the vibration of the engraver and keep my lines smooth. I did rehearse on a piece of scrap metal, but was ultimately not satisfied with the results. They looked as if I had worked whilst suffering a bout of tachycardia. Meh.

However, the story has a happy ending. My hubby came back safe and sound from his trip, and loved his new guitar pick. It doesn´t only look very posh, but also produces a fuller sound than plastic picks - especially when playing chords. I might repeat this project!