UK-UKES

A pile of wood destined for Scandinavia

2007-09-22T19:48:00.000+01:00

Now that the 12 good men (no women to my knowledge) have signed up for the Helsinki Soprano it was time to get into the workshop and prepare the wood!

Above you will see:

Backs and fronts pre-thicknessed to 2.6mm

Sides pre-thicknessed to 2.3mm

Necks planed to 350mm x 63mm x 34mm

Neck blocks planed to 50mm x 20mm - chamfered and waiting to be profiled

Back braces rough sawn to 10 mm thickness

All of this was done in just 2 hours - usually the time it takes to do 2! You are surprised? Well it's like this. The setting up of the machines to do this grunt work takes all the time. This is the reason I love batch production because you can get into an easy rhythm and your productivity is so much higher.

This wood will now sit about for 6 weeks to get acclimated and be added to. I need to cut:

Front brace wood

Bridge plates (these take a lot of time because they are pre-radiused before they are thicknessed - quite a tricky operation)

End blocks

Linings

Bridges

Headstock plates

All this will be done next week.

However much I enjoy this repetitious work, the challenge of a commission also has its own delights.... A much treasured friend and enthusiast gave me an open brief to do something I had never done before - as long as it was a soprano. The resulting research can be seen here:

Although this make look like a bridseye maple profile resting in front of a piece of African Padauk it is actually two pieces of wood glue jointed without gaps! You may ask why, even how? The first question is easy: Chy's uke will be a twin neck soprano with one half mahogany Style O in appearance and the other, 5K... The second questions won't be answered - it's a secret. However, I can tell you I travelled 7000 miles to buy the $5 tool that helped me produce this feat of construction.

Watch this space to see how this ukulele is going to come together...

Hard slog

2007-08-30T19:02:00.000+01:00

Building anything in a batch requires assembling all the parts needed. Here is a pile of bits for 5 tenors. As you can see theses are all the wooden bits. From this pile will emerge a couple of curly mahogany beauties - one plain, the other blinged out. Next there will be two plain tenors and one mastergrade tenor but without the bling.

This was the state of play at 4.00pm this afternoon.

All ribs were hand bent as I haven't got around to making my heat blanket bending jigs yet - winter project. I started bending sides at 9.00am and finished at 11.00am - not bad for someone who hasn't done tenors in a while. I started with the plain KOA to get my eye-memory trained but by the time I got to the mastergrade I was sure it was going to be a lst-lap breeze. Not so - that curly stuff sure is a pain and as I had left it thick and got cocky... well I only have a very faint crack in one of the ribs and no crushing at the waste so that's OK. Nothing that a dab a superglue won't mend.

The afternoon was spent sawing kerfed lining - here is the Frank Ford bandsaw jig that 'automates' this process. If you logon to www.fets.com you can see it in action. Mine is a simplified version that uses a 14tpi metal cutting blade. I made up a batch for the tenor at 12.65mm high. I made a smaller batch for a soprano at 10.5mm high. This may seem fairly insignificant but with a tool like this you can scale lining to suit the size of the instrument.

As at 7.10pm I have one body made up and ready for the lining and in a skeleton mold and one body in the bending/gluing up mold. I'll fit linings tonight and then tomorrow will machine the mortise spline and then put braces on tops and backs. As each body comes together I will glue the brace wood to the front and backs after I have put the lining on so we get a rolling production. With just one mold it has to be done like this to spread the load. In a production shop there would be plenty of molds to take care of business. The bodies should therefore be all together by next weekend - school starts and I go into part time mode for then next 6/7 weeks.

And finally - I had an hour out making up a new router table. I originally used a 'box' to house my trusty Swiss Elu but it was taking up too much space in the workshop. Besides I have a heavy duty copy router that does a real good job of my profiling and that needs to be permanently set up and left. This little puppy was used to chamfer end block and other pieces today and will do other little jobs like through-saddle slots and 'precision' task. BTW if you see one of these routers come up on eBay, buy it. It works like a dream and the Swiss engineering means everything lines up and you don't have to worry about reliability. I have 9 routers now...

Still going in reverse

2007-08-20T22:49:00.000+01:00

The day starts off great. I'm doing my favourite job - jig making. Above you can see my LMII 2" router bit upended in my permanent shaper setup. Behind it is a jig for cutting the relief at the end of brace stock and in the foreground the finished pieces. You might ask: "Why doesn't he do it like everyone else and use a chisel?" Truth is, to get a clean sweeping curve is the hardest thing to do if you've got a bit of spruce that's a little wild or, as in the case of the photograph your are using Douglas Fir! So, half hour to make the jig and 15 minutes to prep up 30 braces - not bad for an hour's work.

Next I made a false base for a new router I got in Canada. On the binding section of Taylor's factory Fridays video series you see the worker clean up a binding channel with a standard laminate trimmer that has an extended base with a top handle on one end. This looked like a way cool method of getting control over the router which can lean as you go around the curves and boy - it works a treat! This is the result:

I'm using English Yew for this little beauty - Mark has waited about 15 months for it and like most of my clients is both patient and understanding. This particular commission is all thanks to George Hinchliffe of Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain fame...

For the back I use my trusty Makita with a tilting base. This does about 75% of the channel perfectly but cannot really cope with the very complex movement of the spherical back with its taper towards the neck end. The solution is to use a Schneider grammel to work the neck end rebate area so it is consistent with the rest of the body. Absolute no brainer and totally consistent. I generally work all around the channel and pick up the wobbly bits. Ever since I have been doing this I have become totally confident with my binding setup and though contemplated it, will not go for that excellent binding machine offered by Stewmac.

However, I let my enthusiasm run away with me and took the router to my little 5K soprano completely forgetting that I had used solid binding for the top. I'll let you guess what happened next - it's too dark now to photograph the pile of splintered wood that was $300 of work and materials.

After that the day got worse and I ended up again with stuff all over the workshop and in a complete mess. I exploded 2 ebony bridges for uklectics but this one made it to Jukkas uke ready for Thursday we hope!

The devil is in the detail!

2007-07-27T18:02:00.000+01:00

The Uklectic project is such a steep re-learning curve! 10 years ago I was happily batch producing ukulele, confidently working up to my 20th production run. I could carve a neck in 20 minutes, fingerboards needed very little fret dressing, I'd joint up 8 sets of backs and fronts in half a day and hand bend eights sets of ribs in a morning - it was a slick operation where I walked through each process as sure footed as a mountain goat in the Alps. Now, with ukulele making one step up from a serious hobby but still part time, the intermittent nature of working takes the edge right off and I find myself going quite slowly. Sure, the confidence is still there but everything takes so much longer than it used to!

Today I was supposed to finish all the neck carving and do the final prep ready for spraying flash coats of sealer prior to grain filling. Well, there are still three fingerboards to mask up and at least another hour of fine tuning the bodies - the soft cedar can ding with just a stray glare in the the wrong place and I now need a head magnifier to check for flat spots and areas that are just not quite right! Anyway, this is what the pre-spray area looks like...

Eight Uklectic Concert Ukulele nearly ready for spraying - just one more hour away from a sealer coat!

Face Lift

2007-07-26T12:36:00.000+01:00

Now the summer is here I have some intense workshop time. To get me into the swing of it I finished Robin's Blues Ukulele. This is a mastergrdae KOA beauty that has quite a dark personality - ideally suited for blues. After about 40 sopranos I think I am starting to get good at these! What has made the difference is moving the second transverse bar on the top about 1/2" further away from the soundhole and using solid linings. This has tightened up the whole body and the sinking I used to get in front of the bridge is no more!

The next project was to revive an old friend - and there is a story to this. About 4 years ago I left in the casement window of my house on a hot sunny day my 'workshop' tenor and forgot about it. This was the survivor of the last batch that I never sent to Hawaii and in a way, it marked the end of an era - the end of 250 six and 8 string tenors. Over the years the price had got tighter and tighter and instead of supplying my trade mark slotted head tenors I went over to the flat snake head style and cheap tuners - I hang my head in shame and luckily there was only ever about 30 - 40 of these 'budget' instruments ever made.

Well I left it in the window all summer and when I was tidying ready for Christmas I saw that the front had separated and because it had been about 4 months, the gap was very wide. Seeing it as an opportunity to continue to refine my weak repair skills I filled it and messed around with string configurations for this Lili'U but just couldn't get the hang of it. So I converted it to a 4 string tenor and let it bang around my workshop.

Another 3 years passed and for some silly reason I find myself playing at the International Ukulele Festival in Helsinki with nothing but a junker tenor looking much the worse for wear. So it was time to revibe (should read revive but my miss-keystroke makes much more sense) this little Frankenstein uke!

First job was to spend 2 hours carefully stripping back the finish and tidying up all the hasty repairs I had done on it over the years (it used to get dropped a lot in the workshop!). Next I plugged the middle string holes . I cut accurate dowels by making a makeshift dowel plate out of a washer that had a taper reamed hole - this is in preparation for a restoration project later in the month. I refaced the front with a 1.5mm Rosewood veneer. It has all been trimmed back, sanded and detailed, had a sealer and filler oil coat. Two more light oil coats and then 10 days curing and we will be back to normal!

Productive Saturday

2007-07-07T21:10:00.000+01:00

Having had a sever muscle spasm in my lower back at the beginning of the week that incapacitated me, it was great to get into the workshop and get fingerboards on the remaining Uklectic production run.

This is an amazing piece of KOA. Well amazing on the Uklectic. When I bought this stuff a couple of years back I thought it would be great for acoustic ukes. However, over time I have come to learn that although this stuff looks great when it is first finished, in thin sections it ripples out and in a couple of years looks very distressed. At .125" thick there is no chance of that happening here!

This is another beauty that could only look good on the Uklectic. The grey spalting adds a note of drama to the front. I've bound the front on this one because when I was flushing the top off, the bearing on the cutter worked itself loose and started to create a rebate...

Now all nine are at the same point it's time to carve the necks, drill friction peg bush holes and start the finishing process. Watch for next saturday's entry... (20th June).

Satisfied Client

2007-06-26T19:12:00.000+01:00

This dear old chap commisioned a uke about a year ago. It was late being completed and he waited patiently. I have a glowing letter of thanks from him which I won't publish. The picture says it all. In his right hand he is proudly brandishing his gold plated Ludwig... looks like I am in good company here!

Workshop Saturdays

2007-06-23T17:08:00.000+01:00

Some things you 'have' to do that you really have to brace yourself for - fret preparation. This is what I call TEDIUM - the unglamorous side of ukulele production building!

The Uklectic has lapped frets so each fret has to be cut and the end of the tang nipped out so it clears the binding. I use the Collings designed, Stewmac built nipper and a pair of Stanley wire cutters that I have custom ground for flush cutting. 342 nips later and I have 9 sets of frets all neatly arranged in a simple organiser.

Next step is laying out the face dot positions at 5,7,10,12 and 15, drilling the 2.5mm holes and gluing some clear white pearl dots in place with superglue. The board is then flushed with a flat block that has 120 grit on one side and 180 on the other. I don't go any finer than this on a rosewood fingerboard because when I dress the frets, the fingerboard will get quite a fine finish. I'll go right up to 320 if I am using ebony though...

Unlike most makers I fret the fingerboard before I glue it in place. This allows me the opportunity to 'press' the frets in using a small ACME rack and pinion press. And because the fret slots are precision dressed with top relief prior to having the binding fitted, there is no tension in the board caused by compression and the frets generally seat down with virtually no need of a fret dress when the completed fiongerboard is glued on the neck. The binding also has a tendency to hold the shape of the board. This won't happen with ebony which has absolutely no give whatsoever. So unless you have milled the fret slots to the precise fret tang width there is always the potential danger of back bow if you glue on the fingerboard and fret afterwards.

If you are trying this at home, it's always a good idea to add a little relief wether in the fingerboard or the fingerboard to neck gluing surface. I couldn't tell you in thousandths of an inch what this should be but a gentle curve from 1st fret to he 19th with a sliver arc of light showing is what you want - vodoo I know but if you were in the workshop, I'd be able to show you...

Half way through the morning when things were going well I had an emergency phone call which meant that work had to stop for the day and 7 Uklectic still remain without their fingerboards!However, I did manage to put together Nipper's and Papaya Boy's ukes and will have SRC's together on Monday. Here is a shot of them minus SRC's:

And this is a closeup of the burr headplate veneer on Nipper's uke... for those trying to identify the drop top on Nipper's uke, it is Madrone... don't ask - another eBay mistaken purchase!

Final testing of Uklectic

2007-06-16T21:12:00.000+01:00

It's now finished and the piezzo is working fine. The video below is poor quality - just recorded on a cheap web cam but you get the idea don't you. This prototype is for sale! Get in touch if you want to purchase it or order one....

Day 6 - I'm pooped!

2007-06-02T23:10:00.000+01:00

Last day in the workshop saw me putting together the Uklectic. I am so pleased with the finished product:

I've yet to wire it up but this thing looks great and even unplugged sounds fine - not an acoustic sensation but enough volume to play 'quietly' and still be heard.

As I need to go to bed here is a quick summary of today's events:

6 Uklectic bodies machined and awaiting tops
2 drop tops glued in place
7 necks preped up and ready for their headplates
Uklectic prototype 'finished'
Birdseye maple Uklectic bound with black plastic binding and neck fitted ready for carving and gluing

Thanks for reading This Week in the Workshop. It's been quite tough trying to remember to photo essay, create montages and still get on with the business of building ukulele. What didn't get done was the two concert commissions that are now 2 months overdue, Robin's little soprano (I forgot to order the Uke Pegs) and the necks for those 4 sopranos. Still there is plenty of time and no-one is breaking down the doors!

TTFN

Day 5 - a dismal day...

2007-06-01T21:50:00.000+01:00

I'd like to report that today has been wonderfully productive but it wasn't! My new 1/2" router arrived (ordered especially for the Uklectic project - trying to save my precision routers for their intended use!) and the cutter I ordered over the Internet. It must have been late at night when I did this because it had a 1/4" shank on it and though adequate, the whole purpose of getting a 2000 watt 1/2" router is to chuck big cutter in it! So off to the local sawyers - the bandsaw blades I got from Axminster Power Tools have been hopelessly ground so the the 'lead' is about 10 degrees off parallel! Order cutter for first class post tomorrow, buy a new Forstener bit for the jack socket recess (I've finally working this out - all will be revealed tomorrow) and get a new narrow blade.

Once back in the workshop I get distracted by the cigar box ukulele bits and start messing with that - sides ready for jointing, neck shaped etc... spent last night buying cigar box labels until I found an incredible resource - 2500 Victorian cigar box labels on a CD. Wow! Now I can have faux labels as well. I also had to do some serious thinking about the label placement but that is another blog. I just want to bang one of these together to see if I have got everything right before I get all excited over it. BTW, that cedar is a s stable as anything. I had the heating on full blast in the workshop and you'd expect the stuff to curl all over the place but no!!!

Anyway, by the time it got to lunch I was in a depressed mood so I decided to clean up the workshop. Woopee - as I was finally getting to the end of it I knocked the canvas hood off the extractor and sprayed the workshop with a good proportion of the dust I had spent the previous 3 hours sucking up! Ho hum...

So how do you get out of a slump. I know, make a jig:

Now this goes extremely well with each bridge taking just 1 minute to profile. As you can see, a false saddle is used as a locator and they just need to be bandsawn roughly to shape and profiled on my shaper. It's now late and the final product couldn't be photographed because the camera batteries died (now in the charger)but early tomorrow the bridge will be glued in place, fingerboard cleaned up, tuners fitted, pickup wired and we'll see if this has been a success. Oh and I'll start machining Simon and Tim's Uklectic if Posty brings the cutter.

5 hours sawing and planing...

2007-05-31T13:59:00.001+01:00

Remember that pile of wood in the last blog? Well it was occupying most of the floor space in the machine shop area so plans to work on the soprano necks has had to shelved today. After 3 hours, this is what some of it looks like now:

These are bodies. You can see that there are two piece sets and three piece sets. I was originally going to keep the quartersawn boards for acoustic ukulele but decided that the 300 or so sets of Mahogany and KOA I already have in stock will see me through for some time yet. So I now have about 38 three piece bodies and 15 two piece - these 15 will be deluxe Uklectic concerts... Here are the necks:

As you can see we go up to 53 sets out of 8 cubic feet of 3" Brazilian Cedar. It makes the bodies twice as expensive as first calculated so I am going to have to find an alternative wood or make cost savings elsewhere if I am to keep this project under £200. The numbering is also significant and it's why sawing took 3 hours...Let me explain:

One of the things that really ticks me off is when I see high value instruments with ugly necks! There is no excuse for using a stacked heel of differing wood when a little care in selection can avoid the 'Liquorice All Sorts' look. In the case of the Uklectic it isn't going to matter to most people if the neck doesn't match the body and for such a 'budget' hand assembled instrument it ought not to. However, it does to me so when I sawed the wood up, I tried my best to get vertical grain for the necks and to cut them from the same plank as the bodies. I actually managed to achieve a good colour match for 70% of the sets with about 50% having true vertical grain. I have also been careful to slip match and book match where appropriate achieving what is a considerable yield from the random width planks I purchased.

Nevertheless, what do you do with all the left overs - and there was quite a pile at the end of sawing? I had a sudden burst of inspiration as I looked at a single long stick which couldn't be used in the Uklelctic project. It wasn't particularly fine grained but with careful layout would yield about 6 quartersawn acoustic necks. Behind me on the table saw was a pile of offcuts that similarly weren't mastergrade but were well enough on the quarter to be defined as 'musical instrument grade' tonewood. So this is what happened in the next 2 hours:

Can you guess? Well I'm not going to run any competitions but what you are looking at is the first ever £135 ukulele from the workshops of UK UKES! Yes, you are looking at 6 fake cigar box ukes! What I am going to do is sticker this up and condition it in the house ready for summer. Meanwhile I'll get onto eBay and purchase some cigar box labels to purty-up the boxes. These Fake-cigar box ukes will be concert size, have 15 frets on a 14 fret to the body neck, squared off peg heads and fingerboard ends. I have some unusual width spaced bridges - part of a pile of rejects that have been hanging around for just this project. The fronts and backs will be three piece jointed with the backs 4mm thick and the sides 6mm thick; the tops of course will be 1.65mm and will be twin Pukkas so that the label can occupy centre stage! An oil finish will enhance the ukes and the whole project will be blogged in August under the title, a Week Outside The Box!

If you want to reserve one of these fun instruments email me at ukulele_pete@btinternet.com
and your name will go into the order book.

Now it's back to the workshop to remake the Uklectic bridge jig and back access plate. - the final stage in the prototyping run.

Day 3 - unofficial

2007-05-29T12:26:00.000+01:00

Before I swan off to Cornwall I thought you'd like to see this pile of Brazilian Cedar (picture on the left). Cost £330/$660. It will make 50 Uklectic bodies and necks. Notice I got 4 boards of quarterawn which are not going into Uklectics but will be set aside for special necks and acoustic sets. The picture on the right shows £1200/$2400 worth of KOA! - a small pile of 10 guitar sets of mastergrade... just to put it all in perspective..

I get surprised every day!

2007-05-28T21:27:00.000+01:00

You know I said at the start of this blog I needed to make $500 a day? Well blow me down I did it... Richard came into the workshop today to pick up his repair and bought a Uklectic concert and I've just got off of the phone confirming a commission for a soprano ukulele. That's $1200/£600! It will make up for not working tomorrow...

Anyway, after that good news this is the result of today's work: 4 sopranos ready to get their necks on. The one at the front is going to end up as a kit, the second one back will go to The Ukulele Shop, the third one has just been set aside for Bev and at the back we have a 14 fret Dreaduke! - not to everyone's taste and if it doesn't sell off here it will go to eBay. These are all KOA - the one in the front however is KOA I had never seen before until 6 months ago when it was sold to me as mastergrade - something it is clearly not and for which I am still awaiting a satisfactory resolution. The other three are very curly one piece tops and backs with matching sides - all from the same board!

In the foreground are the necks that went together earlier today. They now have their headplates glued on and are ready for profiling. I am trying something new - 10mm thick headstocks instead of 11.5mm and slightly shorter than the Martin style with a Gibsonesque tip rather like the Uklelectic drop-tops. That's Wednesday's jobs lined up... see you then.

Gluing up the body...

2007-05-28T10:37:00.000+01:00

This is a picture of the final glue up. I wanted to show this first so you could see how sophisticated the gluing jig is and why after notching for the braces, it takes just 10 minutes to glue the top and back plate to the sides.

The process starts about 20 minutes back from this one. I'll have finished the external prep of the body with the ribs sanded, the neck spline joint cut in the neck block, and the profile of the back and front sanded using dished sanding boards. The front and back will be braced and these shaped ready for notching into the kerfed linings.

So image 1 in the montage above shows the starting point. The second image shows my little kit of tools for this process. Most important of these is the bevel edged stub chisel. This started out as a full length pre-owned chisel purchased for £2 on eBay. I snapped it off to a 2" length and ground back the handle. I then reduced the bevels to zero and width to 5.5mm, grinding the end to a skew. This is perfect for cutting in the brace notches and allows me to work within the limits of the body. I use a PAX veneer saw to cut micro-slits when I have marked the position of the braces, a toggle clamp for gluing and the cordless with an Allen key in to tighten the other clamps in the final glue-up.

I don't number my instruments any more and I don't visibly sign them but if you get a mirror inside you can see it signed and dated underneath the top - I haven't yet been able to do what Frank Ford does and sign in mirror reverse... so image 3 is proof that the work is mine and image 4 shows it's already for the glue!

Image 5 shows ya'll how to spread glue! I say this tongue in cheek because when I visited the Collings factory in 1994 they were very proud of the stalactite (is that the one that hangs down?) of glue on the corner of a table created by workers wiping excess glue from their fingers. Glue on your hands means glue on your instrument. Besides, a wallpaper seam roller will spread glue far more evenly, with hardly any squeeze out (see image 6) in a 10th of the time it takes to wipe it on with your finger.

This body will spend all day in the mold and be ready for neck fitting on Wednesday. Now to glue some back and front braces to a soprano and profiling necks...

Neck stacking

2007-05-28T08:43:00.000+01:00

When buying timber sight unseen there is always huge element of risk taking. 3 years ago I bought 10 cubic feet (120 bd ft) of 3" Brazilian Cedar, not knowing what it was going to be like and not knowing that this would be the last I would see at my timber suppliers! Now it is wishful thinking that every board will be quartersawn and of course, none were so there was no possibility of getting uke back,sides and front sets out of the pile. So it all became neck material. At the time, I was supplying a lot of kits and parts and so needed the wood to be as economically cut as possible. Hence it was machined to 68mm thick, resawn and planed into 68 x 36 mm billets. This gives a decent break angle to the headstock, creates one simple glue joint to 'stack' the heel and provides waste that can be converted to neck blocks, bracing, bridge plates or lining.

As you can see from the montage the first stage in building up the neck is to get rid of all those planer ripples. Unless you are one of the big manufacturers you are going to be using a surface planer/thicknesser and no amount of fine feeding will alter the fact that it is an 'interrupted cut' If you don't want a glue line, then you are going to have to hand plane it! So out comes my 14" trusty Millers Falls Jack Plane sharpened so that it produces gossamer like shavings and creates a wood to wood bond.

In the next picture I have indicated the grain direction. This is important because a feature of wood is that it grows conically - the base of the tree is fatter than the top so to speak. As a result, unless you are very lucky, it is rare to get the grain running absolutely parallel to the length of a billet. I configure the neck blank like this because I carve from the head to the heel thereby allowing me carve 'up hill' for better control of the draw knife and a smooth final cut off my spokeshave. You can also see where I have marked the heel block and indicated how it will be glued to the neck shaft.

Picture three shows the glue up - two cramps and a block to protect the neck/fingerboard gluing surface. Titebond is used here and I will be machining this neck in 3 hours!

The fourth picture shows the necessary offset required to accurately match up the grain. I do not like the spliced head/3/4" shaft/2" neck block style of neck - it looks too much like a Liquorice All Sort (British candy) to me so I aim to carefully match everything. Although not very well focused I have indicated the end grain pattern and where I have picked up the slippage by off setting the glue joint. This won't be an invisible joint but you will be hard pressed to identify it as a 'stacked heel' when it is grain-filled and finished because of the continuity and integrity of the construction.

Day 2 starts with a bang!

2007-05-28T07:57:00.000+01:00

After doing the accounts it is obvious to me that I need to spend the next month making $500 a day! Quite how I am going to do this is not yet clear but as a start I have listed a Vitauke kit on eBay at this location: #280119509645. It looks like this...

This is going to be a bargain for anyone as it is near complete and only require about 5 hours work. Everything is included...

Jig making - my favourite activity

2007-05-26T20:40:00.000+01:00

With the twin pukka succesfully finished and sounding as good as the day it went out of the workshop I turned my attention to the Uklectic bridge. When I designed this ukulele I was hoping to have the pickups made to my specification. Unfortunately, Shadow decided not to get back to me and I had to go to Korea to get them. The company I contacted offered great service and I took an off-the-shelf specified piezzo which has meant a redesign of the bridge increasing its length by 5mm. It has also necessitated building a dedicated router jig...

First up is the jig itself with a bridge blank ready routed. You will notice the rosewood wedge that secures the bridge blank in place. The two Rosewood rails have enough clearance either side for the router to cut a slightly over-sized 2.5mm x 55mm slot thus enabling the pick-up to drop in snuggly rather than being forced into place.

Here is a close-up of the router making the second and final pass to depth.

The router is an old Bosch 500PAF that I bought off eBay. It took me a half hour to flatten the base and it is now the dedicated tool for this job. I buy routers all the time and am up to 7 now - I intend to get more and dedicate each one to a single operation to avoid the tedious set-up times. I currently have one upended for profiling with a bottom bearing cutter, one table mounted for top cutting, a flush cutter in one for trimming overhangs, three set up for rebating binding and purflin grooves. I have just bought another for Uklectic cavity routing...

This is what the finished article looks like:

Jig making is not a sissy's game - this one took about an hour to make! However it now only takes a little over a minute to rout an accurate pickup groove in a bridge blank. It will take another couple of hours on Monday to redo the jig for the bridge but once that is done we are rock and roll... bridges knocked out in 5 minutes flat!

The next step in the Pukka repair

2007-05-26T14:14:00.000+01:00

Titebond 'gabs' pretty quickly so within a couple of hours I can apply the interior patch... Notice necessity being the mother of invention with a rubber band and a map pin to hold the 'S' pad in place!

Twin Pukka Repair

2007-05-26T12:44:00.001+01:00

Twin pukkas are all very well but when someone drops yours on the corner of a table they become the nightmare repair job. This will never be an invisible repair and because the finish is AC lacquer, any reworking of the back and finishing is going to destroy the instruments integrity. The repair is simply a case of try to get it as good as you can.

The brass dowel sticking out of the right sound port is bent into an 'S' shape and has a little shaped pad on the end. With a lot of fiddling you get this about right and wedge it against the top - hence the pad clamped to the front. After the glue has dried in the cracks I'll shape a cedar patch and glue that inside using the dowel pad.

This particular instrument is a Gold Label Island KOA Instruments model. One I pulled out of the batch that used to get sent regularly to Music Exchange in Hawaii. I'll blog and record the sound when it is all back together. It has done very well. It has lovely bookmatched flamed KOA when sets of this stuff were $50 a pop! Now they are more than twice that.

Day 11 - passes without disaster...

2007-04-13T18:09:00.000+01:00

Despite being caught in a traffic go slow due to an accident on the M4 today just outside Cardiff, the day passed without incident and I developed the access plate recess for the Uklectic Concert Ukulele (now the official title for the time being). Here's how its done:

Image #1 It all starts with an accurately made jig - Although this looks like a bit of a lash-up it is not. Using the body contour at the waist, this jig locates in the same place each time - no marking or measuring! You can also see witness 'memory' lines on the birch ply part of the jig to help me remember which way round the insert goes.

Image #2 shows the jig in place ready for drilling the access hole. The quadrant on the lower left of birch ply is the position of the cramp.

Image #3 shows the next stage - cutting the cover plate ledge 2.5mm deep. Insert is removed for this to allow for the 'step'.

Image # 4 the final piece - following the lines of the cavity and providing enough space for screws to adequately fix this in place. You can't see it yet but on the underside of the top, viewed through the cavity, you will be able to see my label...

I also got my new spray set-up going and gave the top of the prototype its final finish - it looks really nice. When it has hardend off I'll do the acces plate and fit and finish it reasy for the launch on the 1st of May. My first 6 will be ready also...

I glued that nasty little fingerboard on the soprano today so it's neck carving first thing tomorrow and preping the two sopranos up for spraying.

Day 10 - more anxieties

2007-04-13T02:14:00.000+01:00

It was going to be a productive day but as soon as I got into the workshop I knew it was going to go pear shaped eventually!

First task of the day was inlaying cut square snowflakes on a soprano fingerboard... I had broken my brad point drill so had to eyeball the starter holes for the cavities... suffice it to say that only 80% were fitted to my standard and although superglue and ebony dust renders invisible joints, they were not all perfect. Time was I'd do 5 guitar fingerboards by hand in a morning and they were fine. Now, with deteriorating eyesight, a small ukulele fingerboard ends up being a trial of patience!

So, it's now getting on and I have to be on the road...

About 2 months ago my compressor expired so off to Cardiff to buy a new one. By taking the wrong turning off a frustratingly busy motorway I added a half hour to my destination time and ended up buying only 95% of what I needed - back to Cardiff on Friday. The onward journey was to Bridgend when a joinery company was supposed to be preparing 10 Ash body blanks for me - they had forgotten to do so! After an hour long wait I end up with 14 because the boy they set on the task couldn't get it right... See picture below - 1st image in the collage:

Upon my return I start to fret the earlier inlaid fingerboard - boy do I hate mandolin fretwire! Fretwire that has been coiled very often has a spiral twist in it. This means that seating into the slot is a nightmare. Such was the pleasure of the nearly 2 hours it took me to do a 15 minute job - the ends could not be nipped with the tang cutter, it wouldn't seat cleanly, I had to take my 10oz hammer to it too often... blah, blah de blah! Not only that, the stock that I had bought for this project I find is very slightly thickner than standard and as a result has sprung the fingerboard. This isn't such a big problem but means and overnioght stay on the bench being stressed back to flat!

So trying to finish the day on a positive note I begin to flush of the drop tops and lo and behold, the router bearing decides to work its way loose and before I know it, I have a rebate cutter on my hands instead of a flushing bit!!!! So the birdseye is going to have black binding after all...

Time to leave the workshop for another day... It's now 2.30am on Friday morning and I have just spent the best part of 4 hours struggling to understand a CAD conversion program - I have found someone who is willing to process the bodies for me - It is very stressful banging out quantities of the same thing with high noise levels so the plan is, if I get orders for more than 6 a month to have a CNC do the hog work. However, I have to prepapre the drawings first...

Day 9 - Errands stop play

2007-04-11T23:50:00.000+01:00

Today was to be the 'lost' day with Dentist, Doctor then visiting... So I only packed a few hours in the workshop with 2 of those spent cleaning up the mess of the last 8 days ready for tomorrow when I can get down to some fine work - see picture of thumb in separate blog - blogger won't upload it!. When I say miracle I mean it - this was like a raw piece of steak this time last week!

So what happened today in the workshop?
More testing. This time the amount of minutes it takes to machine a body... This is very important as the margins on this instrument are very tight and in order to get them out of the door at £195 (they will not be available from retailers - only over the internet) everything has to be checked for profitability. So here are the steps:

If you look at naked uke in the front you will notice a series of what appear to be holes in the bases of the pockets. These are the recesses of the point of a 22m Forstner bit! I am using my trusty 1/4" Dewalt 625 to rout the pockets and this beauty is a precision router. In the real world it would be a 1/2" machine but that is upended permanently on a table and is used as a shaper. So the first thing to be done is to make a light cut with the router to give a perimeter guide and then hogg out the waste in a drill press with the Forstener bit taking the load - timing 11 minutes.
Next the pockets are cleaned up and fully routed to depth - 5 minutes
A template is then fitted to the top of the body and an outline traced in thick pencil - 1 minute.
Over to the bandsaw to cut to the line leaving no waste, just the pencil line - 2 minutes.
Replace the template and screw in place (you can just see the location holes on the centre 'bar') then 0nto the shaper to trim off the pencil line - 1 minute.

You will note the total time of 20 minutes for preparing the body - about a sixth of the time it would take to put together the back and sides of an acoustic uke. It has now taken 30 minutes to get to this point. Next the drop tops are added - you can see where we are going. The ones on the photo have yet to be trimmed but prep time including gluing of these is 30 minutes. Thus it takes a whole hour to put together a body!

I'll cover neck making tomorrow... you wait 'til you see this one!

Day 8 - nearly there

2007-04-10T18:58:00.000+01:00

Those poor sopranos... still the Uklectric is all but out of the protyping stage.

Here is the results of today's jig making:

New headstock shape. I mill this while the blank is in the flat - it gives a cool curve to the tip. The body now has it's smart pockets and as you can see - it all goes together nicely. With all of my fingers intact, it really is time to start on those sopranos...

Day 7 - Consolidation

2007-04-09T22:39:00.000+01:00

Just a bit of eye-candy to start with...

The business of the day was to involve the sopranos but I remembered I had a long standing commitment to move another ton of soil into the back garden. I had to weigh up what to do that would incorporate the interruptions of 5 barrel loads then 2 hours in the workshop... so I set about finishing the gluing up of the body blanks...

And I did some resawing of exotics with a fairly blunt saw - it's a holiday here in the UK and my saw doctor is not open. I ended up with 10 body blanks which is the first batch run :) I have Outrageous KOA, Fiddleback Walnut, Pomele Sapele, Stripey Ebony and Splalted Birdseye Maple as the drop tops... I'll post pics at the end of the week.

By the time the afternoon came I decided it was time to revise the cavity template. By some amazing fluke I found a piece of discarded machinery that helped me create the cavity thickness exactly. It was a massive thick washer that fitted exactly over my 1/2" router bush as a collar and gave a decent 9/16" wall thickness.

This will also act as a 'squaring' jig used on the shaper. I've widened the tenon mortise on the neck to cut down the fitting time for the shoulder and instead of using a pattern router, I am going to use a bush to follow the template as this will enable me to very accurately work with the two depths required for this instrument. The exterior profile jig will be knocked out tomorrow!

Can't wait...