DIY Plugs for Guitar Tuner Holes / Filling Extra Holes, Pt. 2

The next step in filling the holes is to drill out the existing holes a bit to make them a uniform size.  I probably could have gone with 1/8 inch holes, but I was concerned that the dowels would be too tricky to handle.

So I drilled out the old tuner screw holes to 3/16.

Then I made another plug cutter.  This one started life as a 3/16 brass rod.  As with the other cutter, I cut teeth into the end with a small file.

I have this hunk of mahogany from LMI that I'm going to use for the dowels.  You may recall I used generic dowels for the Epiphone bridge pin holes.   But not for this puppy.  I'm going to use real mahogany!  Whoo hoo.

So we use the plug cutter to drill into the mahogany...

...and we wind up with a bunch of plugs!

You can see they aren't perfect - they chipped some on the exiting side.  But it's easy to clean them up with a couple of strokes of the file.

I only need 6, but I had so much fun, I made a few more.

After cleaning up the plugs, we glue them in, and give a little hammer tap to seat them nicely into the holes.  I had a nice tight fit.

Then I hit them with a few coats of stain.  The stain has to dry for 72 hours before I can put a lacquer drop fill/finish coat on them, so I'm in limbo until they're ready.

The raising of the dents I mentioned in the last post came out ok.  They're not level, but they raised up quite a bit.  I think the lacquer should fill them in pretty well.