A second chance of gettin' n'laid

Tonight I started round 2 of working on the inlay. I liked the "Hang 8" feet from before so I'm having a go at it again. And after giving Stew and Dana a peek at options for the inlay they liked the gold pearl.... which I liked too and it's what I used before. I think it works best with the koa.

So here's what we're working with... superglue, gold pearl, ebony fretboard and a print out of the feet.


My brother is really the inlay guy so I borrowed the tools. Including the jewelers saw and this board with a small air pump to blow the dust out of the way.... seems like it just blows it in my face so I was wearing a mask while working on this part.

First I glued the print out to the gold pearl then cut out the feet and toes by hand. The toes are pretty small and I lost a few so I think I cut out 11 to get 8.


Here are the cut out pieces sitting in place and the first try on the right.


The next step will be to use the dremel to route out the place for the pearl on the fretboard. To mark where to route I put the pieces in place and grabbed a can of spray paint. Holding it a ways away so as not to lose more toes I sprayed and it left a nice outline of where to work.


Tomorrow more power tools.

Second Chances

Hi Pav- So these days I guess you might be checking in to see how things are coming along. Enjoy!

The night before last I started laying out the taper of the fretboard as well as the shape for the end. A lot of staring at it and thinking "how am I going to make it the exact same as the other one?" Finally I just decided "use the force" go with the measurements on the plans.......

So tonight I plugged in the bandsaw and cut it to taper. Did some sanding to clean it up and it's looking good. When I add the binding it should come out just right.


Next I got out the sanding block and gave it a coarse sanding to get the radius on it. Tomorrow night..... we get a second chance on the inlay.

On the road again

A package arrived from Hawaii today... a new slotted ebony fretboard and some mother of pearl fretmarker dots. So I headed to the shop.

On my way out I grabbed the iron from the laundry room, soaked an old t-shirt and was on my way.

First I let the iron sit for a while to heat things up.


Then used a putty knife to pry it off.


I went in sections heating it up and gently prying at it until it came off.


Here's the old and the new.


Now I get to do the inlay over again. I've got an assortment of material to choose from.

Happy Birthday Pavi!

Due to technical problems Pavi will not be opening up his new uke at his birthday party. See my post "Houston, we have a problem." Sorry man.

Pavi as some real cool friends that asked me to build the uke, we should all be that fortunate. They will all be paryting like rock stars.

Speak To Me - The Dark Side of the Ukulele

Houston, we have a problem

Well, I've been quiet for a few days. The last work on the uke I was shaping the neck and putting final shape on the fretboard and it came out very nice. Then I started measuring out placement of the bridge, that's when our uke world changed. The 12th fret should be in the middle of the 388mm scale length which would make it 194mm, then another 194mm to the bridge. Well, when I measured the fretboard I came up with 201mm to the 12th fret.... that throws everything out of wack.

So I started measuring around things and came up with this: The fretboard came preslotted and I assumed the end of the board was the nut end of the fretboard, well it turns out it wasn't. The space between the end and the first slot is for if the builder wants to have a zero fret, so the first slot is really the end of the fretboard. I started thinking of how I could work around this but everything I came up with put something else out of wack... like the placement of the inlay, the join to the body and ultimately the placement of the bridge on the body which would affect the sound.

I popped open a barley pop and stared at the thing for an hour.

An e-mail to Bob at Pegasus Guitars & Ukuleles confirmed this, he's the guy that put together the kit and a great guy. His suggestion is to remove the fretboard and replace it. He says it should be pretty easy to heat the fretboard with an iron and remove it. He seemed to understand exactly how I made the error, remember this kit is just the materials and a drawing, not step by step instructions. Given that, he's gonna send a new board and inlay dots... what a great guy!!!!

So I took the uke in to work and showed Stew, Amie and Dana before I start taking it apart. Dana's eyes got huge when Stew pulled it out of the case. I guess it's looking pretty good.

So right now, the new fretboard is on it's way from Hawaii and I've been drinking more barley pop.

Get out the drill

I actually had time to work on the uke today but.... the steps to be done were pretty short, then I had to wait for glue to dry before I could do the next... so just a couple of things done today.

Firrst I glued on the fretboard. I had already marked up where it would go, both the center line and the outside edges. No pictures.

Next, since I kinda like the look of a bound fretboard that's the way we're going, was to glue the ebony binding. Here it is with the normal binding clamp.... blue masking tape.

Then the only thing I could think of to come up with to do was drill the holes for the tuners. Here they are.

Nuts, bolts and glue

I spent some time last night finishing up the fit of the neck to the body and getting some rough shape on the neck. I also drilled the hole for the bolt on neck. I know it's not traditional but it's the way I've started doing guitars and I know I can make it fit and not mess up the angle.

Tonight I spent a fair bit of time staring at the thing trying to decide if I should glue on the fretboard and bind it or glue the neck to the body first. Finally I decided to go with gluing the neck on... now I'm not sure why but here we go.


Tomorow I'll see if we can glue on the fretboard.

It could be a Bird House

Junia was my helper today. First thing she set the uke body up on the workbench and said, "It's could be a birdhouse." Well, ok now we have an option if it doesn't sound good.


The first thing we worked on was getting the neck to fit the body. The end where it is to fit has a slight curve so I placed a piece of sandpaper on that point and sanded the appropriate curve into the heel of the neck. Next some fine adjustments of that to make sure it wasn't at an angle but rather a straight edge along the neck onto the body.


Junia decided she needed her goggles on, I'm not sure how safe they really were once they started to fog up.


We also began working on the bridge. first cutting the blank to the correct size then shaping the ends. I have a bit more reading up on bridges before this gets finished.


And finally tonight I began shaping the heel. I'll get it rough shaped before I glue on the fretboard and bind it.

Gettin' n'leid

Over the past few days I actually have made some progress just a little too distracted to talk about it.

When the tape came off the binding I did some sanding and cleaned up the edges. It came out pretty well, one of the best binding jobs I've done. Usually the clean up ends up with some very thin parts on the binding, this remained very consistent all the way around the body... quite a relief.

I've also been working on the fretboard and it's inlay. I was told that Pav is a bit of a surfer so I found an old Hang Ten logo, two little feet and decided I'd go with that modified a little. To keep it small enough to fit between two frets the pinky toe would have ended up way too small so I changed it to two 4 toed feet... Hang 8. Also my advanced abilities of doing inlay meant it would look a little more free form so here's what we ended up with.

The feet are positioned between the 11th and 13th frets with the 12th running right across them.

There's dots at frets 3, 5, 7 and 9.

More routing and bending

A little bit of progress.... not many photos....

For the binding on the front I remembered to take a photo of the bent binding. I've decided that ebony is a pain to bend. Slow and careful is the key. And on another note, ebony does not float. When soaking it to bend I noticed it sunk to the bottom of my pool.

Here you see the bent binding as well as the body it will go onto.

Then all taped into place.


I also got to work on the headstock which will be bound to match the body. More routing and bending.


Here you see the binding in place, with some overflow filler when I had a little gap. That will get sanded off during the cleanup process. I've also started on the inlay of my logo....


And here's the logo in place... still some clean up to happen.

Bound and Gagged

Ebony is kinda brittle so it all has to be bent on the hot pipe to prevent breaking, here's getting started on the first bend.

A shot of the finished bent binding would have been good.... it's a big curly mess.


Here I've used masking tape to "clamp" the binding into place while the glue dries. And one real clamp at the waist for extra pressure to hold it in tight there.

I have cut out the headstock shape, rough tapered the neck and begun shaping the heel.

A ledge to jump from

I decided to go with ebony binding... since I had some laying around. The first step is to route the ledge this will sit on around he body. I've got a cool tool that goes on the dremel that is adjustable for different sizes of binding.

And we end up with....

I then used the dremel with a router base to route a space to put in an end graft of ebony at the tail. Here it's glued in place and ready to be trimmed up. (A better order of work would have been to do this before routing the binding ledge.)


Here's the neck, I've started laying out some ideas for the headstock shape and found a maple headstock logo I had cut out a while back. The fretboard is just set in place, it is ebony and will be bound with ebony too which will hide the ends of the frets. The headstock will be ebony bound as well.

Keepin' it clean

Got the body all glued together and in the go-bar-deck to clamp it up. The assistant was ready to pull the bars out when it was dry.


Here we have the soundbox. The next step was to trim up the front and back flush with the sides on the router table.

One assistant taking pictures, and one watching to make sure I do everything correctly.


And the photographer then had to make sure everything was cleaned up when we were done.