New ukes started

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. 

Or as we say more often: hiya. The itch is coming back and it can’t all be ticks can it now. I delved into the stash and emerged with mahogany and parts for a reso skeleton. 

Starting out by glueing up the skeleton and sawing out plates for the acoustic soprano. 

Bending did not go smoothly. This is ancient wood and it is brittle, I actually had to bend the soprano rim back to straight again and shave a bit more off with the drum sander. Now it’s a bit thin, maybe I’ll secure it with transverse cleats. I’ll give it a think. 

Last pic is of the reso, I glued the rim onto the skeleton. It is a one piece rim, both because I like that better and because it is much easier to glue since I can tighten it around the round part as I clamp the waist with my waist clamping clamp. 

Cheers! 

Reso [sort of] done

Hiya! In between travels I hunkered down in the workshop for a bit to wrap things up. First up was marking the screw holes for the cover plate, using my clear acrylic template. I have no idea why some words seem to be links.

There is a controversy regarding padding under the cone, some use felt, some prefer using nothing. I use rubber, thinking of it as a speaker cone and those usually hang in flexible material. 

And here you can see the ring of rubber at the bottom of the well. 

I check the bridge for an ok string height, which I leave on the high side for these. A reso sounds best when you spank the strings I think, closely followed by it being played by someone other than me.

The bridge gets notches for the strings and swoopy bits for intonation, the C-string needs to be a tad longer. 

A look at the list says this is number 128!

And I’m really pleased with how it turned out. Headstock is my preferred shape, with offset tuners and the rough-sawn sides (I should tell the buyer that), inlays on the fretboard turned out super, and the spruce / mahogany combo is really elegant. But wait - what’s that dark spot at 10 o’clock by the coverplate? It’s a mark I made in the spruce and then tried to fill, invisibly. I kind of failed. 

String holder

Hello again. Now I’m gonna wrap this one up and get it to a place where we can see whether or not I stil know what I am doing. So I retrieved a cone, a coverplate, a biscuit and some tuners from the stash, and then I realized I need to make a string holder. The punched key-holes in the cover plate are great if you want to shorten your strings quickly, but I have an old nailcutter for that. 

Fortunately I have some keys from and old pedal organ. One of them will do nicely. 

Before I cut it to length I scrape the underside to make it fit the coverplate.

After cutting it I try to shape the new end so it matches the original one, then I mark the position of the holes and drill for screws. 

This is the way it is attached. I will drill holes for the strings tomorrow. 

This post was made on my phone but the app I usually make them in has stopped working. So it might look a bit rough.