Bodies, bending, and more

Oooh err... maybe I have bitten off more than I can chew. But things tend to happen at variable speed in the Argapa dungeön and yesterday that speed was high. 

I started out by glueing the bridge on the piccolo. Then I glued the sides to the top of the cavaquinho. Then I bent the sides for the mock lute, and while the bending iron was hot I sort of started a resonator and a mahogany piccolo. I’ll show the pics. 

First task was drilling the outer string holes through the bridge and top on the piccolo. I put in some thin steel wire to stop the bridge from slipping around. The ruler in the pic is clamped to the neck, giving me some help in holding the bridge while drilling. 

And here are the clamps. You can see the wire at the right edge of the pic. The leather is to protect the wood. 



A quick pic of the cavaquinho on the solera, as the sides are clamped in place by the slats and the long screws, as seen in the epic post ”a hundred dollar screw investment”.



I asked Li to take a pic of me bending the reso sides. The steel and wood push thing helps me avoid burn wounds. 



And here they all are. The lute sides, the reso body, the mahogany piccolo sides and the piccolo with its bridge on. I want to have them ready for a festival in May. 

Bridge prep

After cutting off a wee length of the bridge blank I continue working on the height, the contour and the position. Scale length is 280 mm giving a string length for the G, E and A strings of 282 mm. The C string is longer to alleviate any differences in compensation. 

First pic shows lengthwise placing. 



Above is me drawing a couple of lines on low tack masking tape. The ruler butts up along the fretboard edge and the lines ideally are at equal distances from the edges of the body. 



More tape lock the position, and the string spacing divider gives the, well, string spacing. Divided. 

I mark the outer string positions by laying out a ruler on the fretboard where I want them, at appropriate distances from the edge. 

And here you see the gouge I use to move the point of the ridge back for a longer C string. Hopefully I’ll glue it on today. 

Bridge blank

I’ve made more piccolos than I’ve made any other size ukulele, and most bridges for those have come out of three bridge blanks. One of the blanks might still be kicking around somewhere but searching for it would take me longer than making a new one.

In the first pic you can see the length of cherry I chose, as well as the newly fretted piccolo. I forgot to take pics of pressing the frets in but there are posts on here covering that. I know there are a couple covering making bridge blanks, so please consider me a man of consistency rather than a predictable wind bag. 

To get an idea of the height needed for the bridge I measure thusly; a 3.5 mm drill bit at the 12th fret and the secondary ruler roughly at the string length. Which is the scale length (280 mm) plus compensation (~2 mm). I will make the bridge blank around 9 or 10 mm high and take each bridge down from there.



I score a line with a marking knife and run a chisel lengthwise on one side to get a starting groove for a rabbet plane. It takes very little to steer the plane if it’s set right.



Are my planes set right then? Not all of the time, no. But 95% of the time, yeah! This wonderful old Swedish plane called out to me at a fleamarket. Cheap and in good nick it was a bargain. Aggressive but very precise it rough shapes the blank in no time. It was a task I wanted to last longer, the sound of the plane biting into the wood was special.



As the bridge blank got lower it was harder to keep clamped in the vise, so I took a moment to make two shallow rabbets in the wooden jaws. This will help me loads when I’m working on other small parts.

I did this yesterday. Today I spent in Copenhagen, showing the plans for the new Swedish embassy to the ambassador and the staff. It was fun and all but I really wanted to come back home to continue working on this. Now it’s too late at night so I had to settle for making this entry.