Getting in shape

The kids are gone so I had plenty of time to work this afternoon so today I got two sessions of work in on the uke.

First was to trim the neck and tail blocks to fit. The tail just needed to be cut to length and it's flat side fit perfectly agianst the tail end of the sides. The neck block needed a bit of work. First it only needed to be 60mm long (yes we're doing this all in metric whcih doesn't make sense to me 'cause the kit wasn't from Canada) and th surface of the sides it needs to glue to is somewhat curved. I was able to approximate the line with a pencil then used the belt sander to get the rough shape. Then a pice of sand paper was placed on the spot where the neck block needed to fit and the final shaping was done.... perfect fit. This whole process maybe should have been done before the kerfing was glued in.


Next I layed out where the rest of the braces would go. Trimmed them up to fit and glued them in place. The soundboard has a 25ft raidus curve to it, to achieve this first the braces are all shaped to this curve on one side. Then the soundboard is placed into a dish that has the 25ft radius to it. My brother built a go-bar-deck for just this purpose, with it he made the 25ft radius dish. The go-bar-deck is a clamping system that uses flexible bars to apply pressure to hold pieces in place. Below you can see how it was used to glue the braces.

I took a break or a few hours, came back and the glue was pretty well dry so I was able to shape the braces to their final form. The fans are tapered from 9mm high near the sound hole to 2mm high at the end. The cross braces remain 9mm high but get somewhat triangle shaped...well a rounded triangle.

Well, now that everything is trimmed up it's about time to glue the soundboard on. First I put a piece of sandpaper in the 25ft radius dish and placed the sides in the dish with the kerfing down to create that same radius to match what had been created on the soundboard, then tested everything for fit..... looks good.


So I glued it up.

In this picture you can see that the go-bar-deck as a top to it that the flexable rods press against to create the pressure against the object being glued. This is the first time I've used the go-bar.... and it's pretty sweet.