This guide is based on the method generously taught to me by Phil Noy over about 6 months starting in late 2024. We both believe that knowledge like this belongs to all of us, and that by having it out in the open, the saxophone benefits.
Phil’s saxophone pad making method is elegant because you only need one tool: a laser cutter. With this tool you make your pad die holder, your pad dies, and cut all of your materials. It is a brilliant solution to the problem, and combined with the “Stohrer Sax Pad SVG Generator” program I made using a chatbot, the process is both streamlined and accessible while producing a very high quality pad with a total shop footprint of about 3 feet by 3 feet. Startup costs- including the laser cutter, software, acrylic sheet for the dies, and a heap of leather, felt, and card stock- are about $2500 (as of 2025) to produce about $2500 in pads- though of course it takes time to make them. Once the initial investment is made, pads are thereafter quite cheap to make- around 25 cents to 3 dollars apiece depending on size, and you have total control over the end product and will always have pads you like regardless of backorders or government whimsy.
It took Phil years to hone his method, me about 6 months to learn it from him at a distance and add a few things, and with this guide I believe that you will now be able to go from zero to making high quality saxophone pads inside of a week with diligent effort.
And if you want to try it but don’t want to go whole hog, Phil has you covered. He and his partner Chelsey have built a website that sells premade die holders, die inserts, partially assembled pads, fully assembled pads, basically a build-a-kit for DIY padmaking. This would be perfect if you want to give it a try before committing to buying a laser cutter, or just want to do it every once in a while, like if you are a particularly interested hobbyist and are only repairing your own saxes and therefore do not need to make more than one set every few years. Check it out at Noy Saxophone Supplies. (If it isn’t live yet when I publish this article, it will be soon)
Basic Idea
Here is an overview of the basic workflow.
- Using the laser cutter, cut out components to make a die holder from acrylic and cement the pieces together.
- Cut out die inserts for each pad size.
- Use the SVG generator to make vector files for your materials (card, felt, leather) for whatever pad sizes you want- either big batches of the same size, or sets, a single pad, or whatever.
- Open these .svg files into Lightburn (the software that laser cutters use), apply your cutting settings, and cut the materials using your laser cutter.
- Assemble and glue the pads using your die holder and dies.
- Press and dry the pads in a book press.
- Treat the pads (or treat the leather sheet before cutting it). Let it dry.
- Repeat steps 3-7 as needed.
- You are now a saxophone pad maker.
Shopping List
Leather:
A “pneumatic leather” of the correct thickness- .012″-.015″. I have been using the .3-.4mm kangaroo skin from Packer Leather in Australia and I like it a lot. It is durable, flexible, and ideal for pad wrapping. They show white and black on the website, but you can email and get “chocolate” which is what I have been using. If you are in the USA, to order more than 3 or so skins, you will need to get a permit, which is pretty easy.
Columbia Organ Leather is another good supplier in the USA, and they have a good white and also a good black hairsheep leather (“CPL-Thin”) and a regular tan skin (“CTL”). The white one is what I think I will try to use if anyone brings me an Adolphe Sax instrument to do with original style pads. They used to supply Prestini back in the day, and I plan to try more of their leathers in the future. If you call them, just tell them I sent you so they know what you are looking for.
You can find other suppliers by searching for pneumatic leather, usually it will be coming from organ repair supply places. Note that all leathers will be at least somewhat porous and will need to be treated.
Felt:
I have been using white woven wool felt, 1/8″ thick, from Superior Felt – WOVWHT125-60. This is the thickness you want in order to end up with thin pads, and it seats and performs well. The minimum order is 3 yards I think, a few hundred dollars, and is enough to make a lot of pads. There are other options out there, and as people share them with me, I will add them here. It is also possible, if you order a large amount from the headwater felt makers, to get it “skived” to whatever thickness you want, but this is likely beyond the scope of a single repairer and more into the pad manufacturer side of things, if that is what you want to do. I use shears (these are great and totally worth getting vs. using whatever scissors you have around) to cut my felt rolls into squares the size of my laser cutters work surface. For Europeans, I have heard that calling up The Felt Store and asking for the “Neu-Filz 700” will get you a woven felt of the correct type for padmaking.
Card:
Any card or chipboard stock. Thickness and firmness have a major influence on pad feel- much more so than you’d expect. Since this is very low cost and has a big impact on the characteristics of the pad, you can easily experiment until you get what you want. You can use a thicker or thinner stock to get whatever thickness pads you want without needing to get a thicker felt- or you can laminate something to the stock you like for the same effect. Add your leather thickness x2 (since it wraps over the back) plus felt thickness plus card thickness to get your pad thickness- although if you really crank down on the book press you will squish things a bit and end up with a thinner pad. This is not a bad thing though, just another arrow in your quiver. If you want, you can print your logo on the card stock before lasering it into circles.
Leather Treatment:
6:1 mix of Angelus Leather Paint to Angelus Duller. This makes the leather airtight, nonstick, and watertight. The Angelus paints are mixable—“Chocolate” paint closely matches the chocolate leather from Packer. Not all Angelus colors are waterproof, but “Chocolate” and “Neutral” definitely are. Shake before mixing, use a small scale to get the ratio right, and store it sealed tightly. You must shake well before applying, as well- the duller component is a matte additive that imparts the non-stick qualities, and it settles over time.
The “neutral” dries clear, so is easiest to use, although you may notice a condensation/steam ring forming behind the leather when the hot pad first meets the cold tone hole during initial seating. It’s wild. Disappears shortly. I think it helps the felt take an impression, and is happening to a greater or lesser degree normally, just typically it is hidden from us.
The opaque colors may take several coats to be fully opaque, depending on how different they are from the leather color.
Glue:
Titebond II for fast drying, Titebond III for slower set if needed. I like Titebond II. Any PVA glue will work- apparently Elmer’s was/is used by some pad manufacturers.
The Main Tool:
A diode laser cutter. You use the laser cutters to make your pads dies out of acrylic sheet first, and then it will become the workhorse machine to cut out your leather, felt, and card. 20w is likely ok, 40w is definitely great. This work requires an enclosure and outside venting. You will want a honeycomb work surface if your cutter does not come with one.
Recommended: Creality Falcon2 Pro 40W. This is what I have. It goes on sale frequently for a couple hundred bucks off.
I am sure other laser cutters are totally fine. Just that is the one I am familiar with, and it has all the features you will need for pad making.
Acrylic:
You will want a bunch of 3mm or 1/8″ cast acrylic sheet to make the die holders and die inserts, and you will use acrylic cement to assemble the die holders. Note that diode laser cutters will not cut transparent acrylic, and will be less effective on colors closer to the laser color than other colors.
Press:
Some sort of press will be necessary to get them to dry nice and flat and compress the pleats. I looked for a vintage book press because they look cool but they were expensive! I ended up getting the VEVOR Book Press which works totally fine, is a perfect size for my needs, and I put parchment paper on the faces of the press. You can experiment with how much pressure you use, but you won’t need much. At a minimum, you just want the pleats to dry nice and flat. You can really crank down on it to compress the felt and get a slightly thinner pad, if you want.
Software:
Stohrer Pad Generator to create SVGs. Free and open-source. To use, download the .exe and run. You will get a warning the first time you run it since its unsigned, but I am not paying for a certificate to make that go away. Put it in a folder, because settings and pad presets will be saved there. This program even does basic nesting to save space on your materials! It is fairly self-explanatory to use. If you select more than one material, you will get multiple file outputs. Only mess with the advanced options once you have used it for a bit and made some pads and feel like you have a fairly good understanding of what does what.
You will also need Lightburn to turn SVGs into gcode for the cutter to use. This is the gold standard laser cutter software, and there are lots of tutorials available on YouTube. It’s a 30 day trial, and then $99. Totally worth it for a really capable piece of software. Also note that some SVG viewers will show the SVGs incorrectly; do not bother with them and just use Lightburn to see what they will actually look like in real life.
The Setup
Here is what my setup looks like. I built a little riser out of 2x4s to set the cutter on, and I store my materials under the cutter. You want this riser to be relatively rigid and have some mass so the cutter doesn’t shake while it works.
I made two die holders- one for pads up to 39.5mm, and one for pads 40.0mm and up. This way the smaller pad dies have a smaller outer diameter so I can store each insert with the pad size it makes and organize it that way. Phil uses one die holder, and has a dedicated organizer where he stores all of his die inserts which are all the same outer diameter. You can do it however you want.
Making Sax Pads
First, mess around with the laser cutter. Try downloading some laser cutter plans from Etsy and making a few things. You may want basswood for this part. I made several of these and learned a lot quickly, and also ended up with some stuff to give to my daughter and her friends.
You will want to learn at a minimum how to set the kerf, how to make a materials library and apply speed/power settings. Your laser cutter should come with recommended settings for different materials. Start with these and modify them if you feel like you want a slightly different result. For instance, for the center hole in the materials, I recommend slowing the cut way down- and therefore the power, too. Otherwise, on most machines, you will end up with more of a hexagon shape than a circle. Little things like this will become evident as you mess around, and you can quickly iterate and try again until you have things exactly how you like them.
Once you have messed around a bit and you are ready, make your die holders and your dies. Here are SVGs of the die holders and dies. You will cut these out of acrylic. Do a small sample first and make sure you like how they turn out- the kerf is important here to get accurate sizing.
When you have your die holders assembled and each die has been cut, you are ready to start cutting materials to make pads. Use the Stohrer Sax Pad SVG Generator to make SVGs of whatever size(s) you want, and then open that file in Lightburn. Notice that each SVG layer (outer cut, center hole, engraving) is treated as a separate cut/engrave layer; you will set different speed and power values (analogous to feeds and speeds on a lathe) for each material and each part of the material as needed. Typically whatever laser cutter you have will have a cheat sheet with suggested speeds and powers for different materials, and you can start with those and experiment to get everything how you want.
If you want to change the way that the SVGs are generated (perhaps you want different rules), you can modify the program (it is open-source) or you can use a chatbot to help you generate SVGs or you can draw them yourself in Lightburn or Illustrator or whatever. It should be noted that the program is doing a bit of work for you: undersizing the felts by the correct amount to accommodate the leather thickness, wrapping the leather over the back the correct amount (which is not strictly linear as pad sizes change), undersizing the card by a bit relative to the felt. You will need to account for this if you make your own SVGs. The rules I have made are visible in the code if you wish to inspect it.
Once you have your materials cut, you will assemble the pad in the die and then put it in the press to dry. Use Titebond II for a relatively quick dry time, or Titebond III if you want a longer working time. This is easier than you might think, although there is still some skill involved to get truly good results with a nice even and flat pad face with even and flat pleats on the back.
Once the glue has dried, you can treat your leather if you didn’t do it as a sheet. Once treated, the pads are ready to use.
Since that video has been published, a lot of folks have tried out the method and feedback has been universally positive. I have experienced no issues so far.
It seems like it takes about an hour to assemble a pad set from scratch- meaning take measurements, draw the SVGs, cut the materials, assemble the pads. A more efficient way is going to be to have the cardstock and the felt discs cut out and stored in drawers as if they are pads and cut the leather as needed since that is the most expensive material (and you may want to pick different leathers for different projects). Or just take day every few months and make pads so you’ve always got full cabinets. Each pad costs 25 cents to 3 dollars or so in materials depending on size.
Counting materials plus my hourly labor rate, it seems like rough cost parity with Pisoni pads is achievable if you are efficient. Assembly is time consuming but not hard, and you could do it while watching a movie or you could outsource it if you wanted to someone who had decent hands.
I am now using my self-made pads in addition to Pisoni pads depending on the situation, and I find that I personally prefer working with my own pads, although I still think of Pisoni as a very good pad. One major difference however, is that I find the flatness of my own pads to be far superior. I think that a nice flat pad is is what happens when you have an even tension on the skin all around, and it isn’t too tight. Uneven tension and you get the Pringle effect you see so often on pre-made pads.
Wrap-up
And that is it! I have ended up really enjoying this process, and I really like the pads I am making. I will put them in overhauls when people ask for them, and I will definitely be using them in my own horns. I am going to continue stocking Pisoni pads as well (assuming they don’t get even MORE difficult to deal with than they have been the past few years), but now I am also making my own pads that I happen to really like. I will never need to worry about a backorder again, or the crazy prices of pre-made pads, or be forced to make the choice to start stocking a pad I feel is not as good because of availability or pricing issues.
I hope that you have enjoyed this writeup, and that you find it helpful, useful, and informative. If you take the plunge and start making your own pads, please share with the community anything you learn. I feel like this skill is something that we all should own, together.
Thanks
Thank you to Phil Noy and his partner Chelsey Molloy for teaching me how to do this and allowing me to share it afterwards. Thank you to Steven Georges, Will Peak, Brennan Lagen, Carlo Cennamo, Eric Wistreich, Tyler Anderson, Brian at GetASax, and Jimmy Roffman for their contributions and feedback during the process.