Prepping spruce tops

The mini guitar and the cavaquinho will be quite similar, walnut back and sides and spruce tops. The walnut was thicknessed in the drum sander but I won’t miss the chance to hand plane the spruce. It just gets so much better. 

I ended up taking the tops down to just below 2 mm, the instruments will have a greater string tensions than a concert ukulele so I’ll need to think about bracing soon. 



Spruce is soft so I threw on a wash coat of shellac to protect it from dings and scratches, and went on to making the rosettes. Johan did the heavy lifting on the one for the guitar, the groove is 2 mm wide and houses four layers of mahogany purfling strips. When the superglue had set I took it down with a Berg chisel.