Resawing and preparing wood for another reso

I am getting ready to make a resonator for a nice bloke in Scotland. I asked what woods he fancied and he said I could choose whatever I wanted to build of. 

So I found this very nice scrap piece of floor board, with a very nice grain. 

After planing in the machine planer I ripped it on the table saw. On one side of the core I got the piece for the rim, on the other it eas wide enough to get halves for the top and bottom. 



But the home made drive belt for the bandsaw gave up as I was starting to resaw it. Lucky me then, having the newly restored rip saw at hand. It cut fast and straight. 

Note the moxon vise, I made it the other day. 



Here it is. The ends closest to the camera is the ten centimeters cut by the bandsaw. 



After laying out with a template to choose what parts to use I cut them to length. 



I planed the edges and glued the parts up with the tape method. This’ll be fun. I hope the spruce bends ok, for the rim. 

Restoring a rip saw, and carving a spoon

Another flea market saw to rescue. This is an old Swedish Sandvik, old enough to be labelled ”Sandvikens Jernverks AB”.  It’s grimy, somewhat rusty, and the handle needs a bit of a touch-up. 

I’m building a shallow tray from some scrap wood. 

I lined the tray with plastic and put the saw in a vinegar bath to see if it would dissolve the rust. 



After a while bubbles formed, and the rust turned gooey. Most of it came off with some scrubbing. I didn’t do it too hard because of the etched markings. I’d like to keep those intact. 



I scraped the handle clean and strengthened the wood around the screw holes with some thin superglue. 



And here it is. A couple of coats of oil on the handle and it’s ready for sharpening. The rest of the spots and blotches on the blade are flat and smooth and shouldn’t interfere with sawing. With a bit of luck some of them will disappear. 



I also carved a spoon. Much trickier than expected. It turned out ok but I will make another to see if I can improve. 

This year’s exile chores

Well I got to the rickety cottage 350 km south of Stöckhölm, and with me I have the three ukes from the bench. A mad dash on Monday means I am at the finishing stage of all three, so I brought the shellac kit, some scrapers and also a couple of fret files. 

The ukes all fit in the weird bow case I found at a thrift store, behind them on the table are my wee bass from Tinguitar and the much loved shruti box. 

The first coat of shellac on the mahogany soprano. This never gets old. Never. 



And here it was last night, hung to dry. 



Quite late at night I started to level the frets on the reso. The daylight was almost entirely gone and the electricity in this cottage is a hot mess so I started by the light of a candle. 



When it came to crowning and rounding off the ends I had upgraded to three candles. It went ok I thought and was quite relieved this morning when I could confirm that. Both the three corner crowning file and the end dressing file come from Stewmac. A lot can be said of their pricing but I couldn’t do what I do without their tools. 



And then it’s coat after coat of shellac. I’m at four now and tomorrow I’ll give them a quick rubdown with steel wool and start to polish them with walnut oil on the muneca. That will build the finish quickly but I’ve come to the conclusion that I need a few coats on the wood before the oil comes. 

Fretboards, continued

I have an expensive fret saw from Knew concepts that I really want to like. It has an excentric cam lock to tighten the blade, but it has started to act strangely. So I use this one more now, like many of my tools it’s something I found at a flea market. It is actually more versatile because of its large cutting depth. In this pic I use it to cut away some overhang from the top and back. 

Then I cut it flush with an old Mora knife. Almost anything to avoid using a router and a flush cutting bit like real builders do. 



I slotted the fretboards for the soprano and the reso (also a soprano, natch) and tapered them to the exact dimensions. Careful measuring and delicate cutting. 



Well, sort of delicate anyway. If I need to hog away larger amounts of material I will reach for a larger tool. 



Then I sneak up on the line with a sharp hand plane, this time my Record number 7. 



This is how they look with the ends sort of shaped but before position markers and frets. 



I press the frets in before glueing the boards on, using my own version of a much more expensive fret press. 



I let two of the position markers stick out through the fretboard. The markers are pieces of styrene rod so it’s easy to use it as dowels that prevent slipping. 

And I started working on the bridge too. It’s also ipe, or lapacho as we learned in the last post.