Closing the piccolo, carving lute neck

Things happen at a comfortable pace. Before going away to dinner yesterday I continued in the workshop.

I mount the back braces in the lining before glueing the back on. Not common practice at all but it suits me. The body is clamped down on the solera with a caul at the soundhole, and the neck is also clamped down with a shim at the nut end to give it the correct angle. This isn’t visible in the pic. 

The back goes on and is clamped down with wooden slats that bend and conform to the shape of the uke.



I check for squeeze out on the far side with a mirror. Everything looks good.



Then I turned to the lute-ish neck. It won’t fit easily in my carving jig and the cherry wood was really hard to carve, so I tried a rasp. Not a tool I use often but I must say I understand now that many builders do. I roughed out the profile at the nut end in no time, and went on to the heel to get both an entry and an exit point for the spokeshave.

The heel would have been very tricky with just the knife. With the rasp it was fast and easy. 

Then on to the spokeshave. I did use a more massive drawknife as well to negotiate some reversing grain.



But the whittling knife was necessary to get rid of the rough surface left by the rasp. The pencil line at the heel is a guesstimated cut line but I’ll deal with that when the body comes together. The mock lute will have six strings so the headstock will be fun to solve.