Mock lute done

Well gosh darn and blimey, it’s done. The C and E strings are doubled and that is a revelation - I love the tuning and the six strings. 

Its geometry fought me during the build but I prevailed. 

I watched a video of a builder making bowl backed instruments and thought I understood it, but I had to use some force to get it together. The contrasting wood is walnut. 



My customer asked for one thing in the first email, that the peghead would have a less acute angle. Guess what, I forgot. So sorry David, there will be a discount!



I used a guitar bridge pin as an end pin to get the right scale. 

Slow but unsteady

We’re having the worst heatwave I can remember. I have to stay in the shade and take it as easy as possible. But I made the bridge (twice) and glued it on (twice). I started finishing (twice) and stripped off the finish (once). 

And I made the six holes and reamed them for the set of Wittner Fein tuners I got from Germany. More about them later. 



And I took my Dobro tenor guitar apart to service it some. I wanted to make a bone nut and try different strings. Now it sounds better but I might change the strings to get a wee bit more tension on the cone. 



Here’s the saddle slot in the spider, it was super rough so I trued it up and recessed the screw. 

Vacation time, continued

I’m back in Sweden, at the summer house with the best view. I brought the mock lute and a set of tools that’ll let me finish it. If all goes well..!

Mock lute soundboard and piccolo assembly

Having done the back of the mock lute I started on a spruce soundboard. I needed to access the innards of the body to reinforce some seams of tricky geometry, that’s why I build backwards this time. 

A sharp number 4 plane with a cambered blade rushes through the wood as if it was a thick dairy product. Butter or cheese. 

Then I made the rosette channel with my rosette cutter, easily the coolest tool I ever invested [rather heavily] in. Two cuts with a knife-like blade, then some routing with a narrow chisel blade. 



I bent a mahogany strip on my secondary bending iron. It’s a huge soldering iron with a tip for, I think, de-horning cows. It gets crazy hot really fast so I have it plugged in for a couple of minutes tops. 



After some fiddling it fit, the strip is 0.5 mm so four turns to fill the 2 mm slot. 



I glued with thin, and after that medium ca glue. Here’s me paring it down once the glue is dry. With a Narex paring chisel. 



Bracing in the go bar deck, after this pic I added a single brace across the bridge patch to secure the dome in the soundboard. 



And some miniature plane action. Of cöurse!



While the glue on the rosette dried I marked out a centerline on the cherry piccolo, and matched the neck to the body. Avoiding sandpaper means you have to have sharp scrapers so I had to build a sharpening jig for my Stewmac ultimate scraper. 



And here it is after assembly. The still square lute soundboard behind it reveals the jumbled timeline, but hey - it’s my blog and you can cry if you want to. 

Piccolo neck carved, and progress on mock lute

I carved the neck for the piccolo in progress, as always my favourite task during any build. I started out by making recesses as entry and exit points. 

The rasp makes short work of it, at the heel and at the headstock end. This piece of cherry has a bit of figure to it, and is quite hard. 



Then with a couple of different spokeshaves (but mostly this small one) I connect the recesses, keeping the width and creating the slight v-shape that I favour. 



Ta-daa! It was over much too soon. Around twenty minutes and that was working slow on purpose to make it last longer. 



Then I bent a couple of walnut pieces to close the back of the mock lute. I’m not a hundred percent sure of my strategy yet, it will become clear in a few days. 



Here are the pieces clamped to the rest of the mock lute, the joints were ok but needed some adjustments afterwards. 

Onwards, and an apology

Let’s get the apology out of the way. I fear my blog posts are the worst - the pics are messy to the point of being impossible to interpret, the chronology is jumbled and I’m not a very good example of a disciplined luthier. 

That said, brace yourselves. 

Today’s first pic is me sawing the neck block of the mock lute to height and, hopefully, angle. I’ve settled at last upon the way in which I’ll build the back. 

Then I turned to the mahogany piccolo I hope to get ready for MUMF in May. I chose to use a popsicle brace above the soundhole. I’ve done that before and it felt right. Beside lie the bodies for the cavaquinho and the mini guitar. 



Then I glued the back on the reso, and made the half uni-brace on the mock lute. That will aid me in building the back. 



I didn’t find the mahogany neck blank I thought was kicking around, but I did find a couple of Spanish cedar neck blanks in piccolo size. Cedar is way too soft to be a fingerboard, so as an experiment I’ve glued cocobolo scraps from that reso to the upper surface on them both. The cocobolo is thinner than a normal fretboard but could work as a harder surface. I’ll try one and see if it looks corny or cool. 

Bodies, bending, and more

Oooh err... maybe I have bitten off more than I can chew. But things tend to happen at variable speed in the Argapa dungeön and yesterday that speed was high. 

I started out by glueing the bridge on the piccolo. Then I glued the sides to the top of the cavaquinho. Then I bent the sides for the mock lute, and while the bending iron was hot I sort of started a resonator and a mahogany piccolo. I’ll show the pics. 

First task was drilling the outer string holes through the bridge and top on the piccolo. I put in some thin steel wire to stop the bridge from slipping around. The ruler in the pic is clamped to the neck, giving me some help in holding the bridge while drilling. 

And here are the clamps. You can see the wire at the right edge of the pic. The leather is to protect the wood. 



A quick pic of the cavaquinho on the solera, as the sides are clamped in place by the slats and the long screws, as seen in the epic post ”a hundred dollar screw investment”.



I asked Li to take a pic of me bending the reso sides. The steel and wood push thing helps me avoid burn wounds. 



And here they all are. The lute sides, the reso body, the mahogany piccolo sides and the piccolo with its bridge on. I want to have them ready for a festival in May. 

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.

Neck blank for lute uke

Merry whatever, and a happy another!

I’m making another lute inspired ukulele. Someone asked me nicely and I couldn’t say no. I have some special tuners on the way so I made a neck blank with that crazy lute angle. 

Here’s the piece. I started out by severing the headstock. 

Then I made an angled joint with a straight tenon for some added long grain glue surfaces. 



Checking the fit. Decided to accept the looks of it. I really need to look at a few pictures of real lutes before going far. 



Glued and trimmed flush. The headstock will be an open box, like what you see on a violin. The tuners come from Wittner, internally geared just like pegheds. 



And I attached the neck to the piccolo I’m working on. Not much remaining now; frets, back braces, back, bridge and tuners.