Inlays, the presumed hard way

Last night I found the fretboard for the koa soprano, and started thinking about inlays. I decided to put a shardvof broken mother of pearl at the seventh fret, and in preparation for routing the cavity I glued it on with a drop of ca glue. 

Then I scored around it with a Swiss marking knife, very pointy and sharp. Like my boots. 

Then off it popped, leaving the traced line around the contour. 

But it was too late to fire up the router. Still I wanted progress. So out came the small chisel. And I made the line deeper and started digging in. 

And after five minutes and without the increase in heart rate that my router inevitably gives me, the cavity was done. The piece fitted snugly. 

Add glue, a piece of plastic and press it down!

Then this morning I drilled for 2 mm pearl dots, again without using power tools. My miniature drill works just as fast. 

I'll still have use for my Proxxon drill, but mush less. If I didn't need it with its angle attachment when I mount piccolo necks I'd put it on ebay.

Resonator sides

Do you remember the post from just after summer, where I started all those ukes at once? Well things are moving along. The concert is done, the tenor an the piccolo need only a final rubbing and bits like nuts and tuners. The koa soprano is actually well under way and also spoken for. 

But what of those resos. It's a wee bit annoying; I have gotten so much praise for them and so many enquiries from people who saw or heard one. Yet I build them sort of reluctantly. Get me right, I love how they turn out and I'm awfully proud of them. The truth is they sound a lot better than most resos. But I depend heavily on the hardware that I have to import, and that's both expensive and cumbersome. 

And then it's my method of building them, an improvised way from the start but one I don't dare to stray from now. Building the skeletons take forever. 

But the worst task is bending a one piece rim to a snug fit around the skeleton! Drives me mad. I also make two piece bookmatched sides but today was one of each. 

First out was the one piece rim, of mahogany. I can't remember sanding this piece but today I found it was on the thick side of ideal. 

It took me two hours! Then I clamped it using no fewer than 666 clamps. 

Then I turned to the two pieces of ash for the other one. They bent easier than masking tape. Took me all of five minutes to bend both. I put brown paper tape at the joint and did a dry run, which you can see in the pic. 

Last pic is of the koa soprano, top and bottom cut flush to the sides, then the whoke assembly was sanded and scraped. I remember slotting the fretboard for this one. Hopefully I can find it. 

Videos of number 75, and a few others

I sat down yesterday and made a demo of the recently finished koa concert, number 75.

And then later I grabbed a few more ukes and made this:

They might go in and out of tune but hopefully you can hear the differences, which were quite big at least in the sofa. My boy Johan was very excited and I might start using his newly fangled words next time I describe differences in sound!