Completed Argapas 76 and 77

Yesterday I strung the piccolo up so now I have two new ukes to show at the same time. 

I chose the quilt background to give an even more crafty impression. 

Bookmatched panels on the tenor, one piece top and back on the piccolo. 

Maple rosette, you can see the joint at four o'clock. 

The bridge on the tenor. 

The ebony bridge on the piccolo. 

But where will they end up? Ho ho ho.

Finishing

The koa concert needs either the final "glaze coat", which so far has proven to be very difficult. Or a buffing with some polish compound. I might settle for the latter, that at least I know how to pull off. 

The walnut tenor and the mahogany piccolo (sod secrecy; here it is) are sealed, almost pore filled and ready for some more shellac. I could do another session of pore filling but have yet to decide exactly what I'm aiming at with these two. Semi-filled pores might be just right. 

Here's the concert. Rather cool figure. 

I gave the piccolo and the tenor a few more coats. It's starting to build up nicely. I'll let it shrink back a couple of days, then scrape it with a card scraper and start the french polishing work. Up until now I have avoided oil, but will use it from now on. I use walnut oil instead of olive oil, my experience is better with the aforementioned. If I understand it correctly, it dries together with the shellac and gives a tougher finish. Be that as it may, I don't have to wipe any excess off between coats. 

Workshop glimpse, early November

Oops, we're in November already and October didn't see much action on this blog. Sorry about that, especially since I keep referring prospective buyers here. 

The explanation (which is not an excuse) is I've been abroad in work and then I spent a wonderful week's vacation at the summer house. But the project there is building a sauna at the moment. 

But things do tend to happen in the Argapa cave even if I don't publish enough. So tonight I'll show you some pics of the concert and of the bridge to the walnut tenor. 

The koa concert is on the home stretch. I've given it its wash and build coats of shellac and scraped it back. My new method of doing these coats cut a week from finishing, at least. 

Then some pics of that bridge. I showed you the one I made for the concert, this will have wings but I chose the same wood and the same tools. I considered ebony but that's so hard to plane and carve. And I thought this bridge would go nicely to the headplate veneer. 

The only machining I did was cutting the slanted saddle slot on my mini table saw, before and after that it was only edge tools. No sandpaper or even files. 

In this first pic you can see how I chisel away the end to make a wing. On the first end the grain direction was helping me, on the other end it was really tricky. 

Here you can see the wing after paring for a few minutes. 

The other end done, and a couple of facets. 

Two curves snuck into the design while nobody was watching. 

I love freehand carving. Never will I settle for a bridge design and crank out twenty at the time, it's so much more fun to let them grow into shape depending on the piece of wood and my mood. 

I think the walnut shows some promise, don't you?

(What I haven't shown is the custom piccolo. It's taking shape but it's gonna be a surprise for someone. Anyway it got its fretboard glued today.)

Glueing back braces on the walnut tenor

Tonight I did some work on the tenor which is in progress. The first pic shows it clamped on the workboard. You can see the pickup I installed, a K&K twin spot. It's very neat and the cable won't rattle against anything. But I found it irksome to get the nuts tight enough and would not attempt to mount one of these on a completed uke, the back being off was crucial for me. 

I build backwards, putting the braces in the body and not on the back. Here you can see me tracing the curvature on the radius dish. 

With the Veritas apron plane clamped in the Zyliss vise I take the braces close to final shape. The braces are triangular in section, I sliced a longer rectangular profile into three pieces on the mini table saw. Grain direction is vertical. 

Then some super fast sanding in the dish. 

The braces are shaped with a carving knife and the miniature block plane (which is a lovely tool).

The notches in the linings are cut with a model maker's saw, I think it's an Exacto. I used one of these in England this summer and bought one when I got home. I've used a Japanese saw for this earlier but it's too aggressive. The notches are triangular to suit the braces. 

Done. Would you look at those brass clamps? They're available online, I think I got mine from a webshop in New Jersey. 

Also, in the foreground is my friend Tiny Plane, and its friend Wee Shavings. 

Setting a neck

The walnut tenor turned out to be flat and square where it needed to be flat and square, and its alder neck was also dead easy to align. Usually I do quite a lot of sanding on the mating surfaces to get the centerlines perfectly straight and I also shoot for either a slight neck angle or a flush surface from neck to soundboard. 

The final neck angle I set when I glue the back so as long as I don't have a negative neck angle at this stage I'm content. 

And the joint between heel and body doesn't have to be perpendicular to the centerline. It was exactly so on this tenor but a miniscule angle won't matter. (I'm talking about angles that could be measured but hardly seen, and certainly not after the fretboard goes on.)

But this time everything was aligned after a couple of minutes, so onwards with drilling the holes. I use a screw and barrel bolt connection and since I made this drilling jig I get consistent and accurate results every time. I chose to shim it this time because the heel is rather slim, but that only offsets the hole from the face of the heel. (Oh, the anatomical nightmares of luthiery.)

Pointy end at centerline and away we go! The jig fits the Zyliss vise beautifully. 

The neck gets two holes since the barrel bolt is there, 10 mm for the bolt and 6 for the screw. I used to make my own barrel bolts to get down to 8 mm, but that was hard work so now I just buy the standard ones. 

This last pic is from the dry fit. I often make the hole in the neck block 6.5 or 7 mm to get wiggle room but that wasn't necessary today. Now off to the office. 

Bracing and binding

Since I got back from the Middle East I've braced the concert soundboard, glued it to the sides and worked on binding both the concert and the tenor. 

I shape the braces with a large array of tiny planes. It's resting on a mouse mat that I bought on sale, and you might remember the Dust-E-Whacker. 

This concert will be slightly narrower than my other ones, the sides were a little shorter than I had wished. 

I routed the binding channel on the walut tenor. And it's an easy wood to work with, no surprises and no splinters or tear-outs. But I have to wear a dust mask. 

The last pic shows the binding installed and taped, and the concert has been routed as well. On both I bent a single piece of mahogany binding, but that is unnecessarily difficult really. You have to be really careful to avoid gaps which will appear if the distance between the two waist bends isn't exactly right. 

Progress

Well I have pressed on with the acoustics. Since the humidity was a bit high in the shop (and everywhere else) I didn't wanna brace any tops. So I concentrated on the sides and put the blocks and the kerfed lining in. 

Installing neck reinforcement rods

I know it's rarely needed, but I see other builders do it and argue for it so since I had some carbon fibre rods at home I wanted to give it a go. Five necks; three sopranos, a tenor and a concert.

I cut the rods to length, roughly from the heel end and back to the first fret. Then I sliced them diagonally to wedges, thinking the thinner end should go towards the headstock where the neck profile is slimmer. But why, you might wonder, strengthen the fatter part more - that'd be strong enough already. Well there's more wood there and my feeling is that a thicker piece could warp more if humidity and temperature would play up. 

In the pic there placed on the neck backwards. 

Then I was going to place a block of 12 mm thickness at the first fret location and run it across my mini table saw, to get the slot to even out to zero where the wedges end. But the table on the saw is tiny and the block wouldn't make contact at first. Bummer! I really did not fancy making special wedges for each neck size!

But wait..! Wedges? I had wedges already didn't I. After an unprecedented stroke of genius, this is what I came up with. 

I superglued the sliced rods on some wide masking tape and Bob was, indeed, your uncle. Or my uncle. 

After running it over the blade a couple of passes (blade is 1.5 mm and the rods 2) this was the result. 

And after 10 more minutes this was the result. 

Clever, huh? And the tape already in place in time for glueing! Out came the epoxy. 

You'll notice that not all pairs are centered, but they will be. I avoided some sapwood on one and a chip out on another.

I feel so good about myself I'm gonna publish this method on various fora.