It was going to be hot in California today, so after my morning coffee I went out to the backyard to work on my ukulele.  I already had the center sound hole cut away and part of the neck – now I needed to cut away the excess from along the neck and shape it.

Here’s some photos with some short descriptions.  Some notes on my process after.

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I know the sound hole is wonky.  I’d aggressively attacked it with my most course file, but it’s not a great way to remove excess wood.  I may just up for a slightly lopsided cavity because it will never matter to the sound or the only person who’s ever likely to play it.

The coping saw worked really well today.  The blade that came with the coping saw would probably be described as “fine” and it broke pretty quickly.  After I bought new blades, I replaced it with the most course blade of the assortment which also broke pretty quickly.  I strongly suspect it had more to do with my (lack of) technique than any unreasonable defect in the blades.

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• The techniques that probably contributed to broken blades:
  • As I sawed downwards, I would also put a lot of downwards force on the blade.  I found that I was putting force on my thumb along the handle, which created a lot of force on a single point on the blade.  I believe if I had focused on putting force along the teeth, in line with the blade, I don’t think I would have broken the blades as easily.
  • Sometimes, as I was trying to maneuver the blade, I found myself trying to cut an angle by pushing the blade sideways – since it wasn’t possible to rotate the blade since the frame would have been blocked by the neck or the body in some way.  I believe if I’d managed to rotate the blade a little more, it would have allowed me to avoid breaking the blades.
• Things I should have done better:
  • I should have gone slower or been more careful with the course files.  I added a few more gouges than I should have in a couple of areas.  Hopefully by the time I’m done they’ll either be fixed / filed or sanded out or have become part of the charm and character of the ukulele.
  • When I removed some of the blue tape, it stripped some of the wood off the face of the fretboard.  I’m not sure what I could have done to prevent this.
  • Using my awl to mark the board worked well in some spots (way to the sides of the fretboard) and terribly in other areas (around the curve of the body and above where the strings go into the neck).  These are difficult to file or sand away.  Next time I would make lighter indentations as they get closer to the areas to be cut away or just find a way to draw them in with pencil.
• Things I did that worked well:
  • Making the lateral cuts along the neck (with the hacksaw) really helped.  Not only did it seem to make removing each successive section of wood easier by allowing me to get them out of the way, it also became easier to maneuver the blade without those sections in the way.  It also helped me have little goal posts to point the blade towards as I cut.
  • Rather than using the two “techniques” above, rotating the saw blade when I could or when I couldn’t, some combination of reversing the blade and/or putting the saw inside the sound hole really helped.
  • Still saving the cutoffs so that I can test superglue, wood oil, and wood wax later on.  Excepting the sawdust, I’ve probably saved 95% of the pieces coming off the board.
• Improvements I may yet make
  • I doubt the project requires a solid piece of metal running all the way through the turn around, but I could always swap out one of the two 1.25″ #10-24 machine screws for a 1.5″ screw, to provide more support.  I’m not going to bother doing this unless it looks like the turn around seems to be bowing to the pressure of the four strings.
  • I didn’t print the turn around with the highest possible resolution settings.  Even if I had, due to the nature of printing curved top surfaces, it would always look a little rough.  Once the entire ukulele is assembled, it wouldn’t be that big a deal to loosen the strings, pull out the turn around, and replace it with a nicer one.  This could be achieved by simply printing a new turn around with a finer resolution, sanding it a little, and then hitting it with a little spray paint similar to this one at NorwegianCreations.  I would probably print the design with deeper grooves for the strings too.
• Things I might try on a second go-around
  • The 3/4″ thick plank of wood is a bit thick for the neck.  I suspect I’ll need to file or sand a fair bit away before it feels comfortable and natural to hold.  It’s possible using a thinner piece of wood for the entire project might work out well, possibly down to 1/2″ thick.  The obvious problem with going any thinner than 3/4″ is there won’t be enough material to drill into to install the tuners.  While this could be solved with some 3D printing wizardry, I want a mostly natural wood ukulele, rather than a plastic / wood hybrid.
  • I think a router might be a good way to cut carve this project out.  There are some possible problems, but nothing insurmountable.  I don’t have a work bench or vise to hold the project steady while I routed the wood.  I could possibly work around this by setting the project down on a small piece of plywood, then drilling some scrap wood around it on four sides to keep it from moving.  In thinking back to one of Daniel’s instagram posts, I remembered he used a small router with a roundover bit to make the neck more comfortable to hold.  From the short video, it looks like he’s using the “Drill Master 1/2 HP 1/4″ Trim Router” from Harbor Freight.  It’s $30 right now, but the reviews suggest it’s been on sale recently for as low as $20.  I don’t know if it’s powerful enough to rout all the way through a piece of 3/4″ hardwood.
  • I have some ideas on how I could create a more cylindrical turn around.   It would be to create the turn around in two halves that each have a section the machine screws go through, so that once it’s put together and the machine screws inserted, they’ll stay together.  However, I really don’t think the very slight cosmetic differential is worth the additional effort and engineering time.
  • There doesn’t seem to be much of a reason, besides spacing, for the turn around to be so far down the body of the ukulele from the bridge.  I would think the turn around could be almost directly under the bridge.  Either way, even if the bridge didn’t have brackets holding it down, it would still be held down in place by the strings pressing it into the wood.  In this case, I would think it possible to create an integrated bridge / turn around.  The real difficulty would be that there would be no good way (absent even more engineering) to make the bridge location adjustable to ensure proper spacing.

The photos above were over the course of about two hours.  I suspect I’ve got another two hours of additional filing and sanding to go – and that’s if I don’t try to file the sound hole to a more symmetrical shape.1

My next steps, roughly:

• More filing and sanding
  • Filing and sanding down the gouges
  • Softening the corners and edges
  • Adding more of a curve under the neck
  • Moving from the coarsest file down to my finest file then from my coarsest sandpaper to the finest
  • Wiping all the dust off
  • Drilling a slightly larger hole under the neck, so the string knots are buried inside the neck, rather than poking out
• Super gluing the frets and zero fret
  • Test supergluing the cotter pins to cutoffs
  • Double check all the measurements for the frets2
  • Erasing bad fretlines and drawing in better ones as necessary
• Wood oil and wax to finish
  • Looking through Daniel Hulbert’s various ukulele tutorials, I found a reference to “Tru-Oil finish with a gunstock wax polishing.”  These appear to be products used for gun stocks, but according to their reviews and several other blog posts out there, other wood projects including guitars!
  • The good thing about these products, the “Tru-Oil gun stock finish” and “Gun stock wax,” is that they’re both reasonably inexpensive and small (only 3oz each).  I don’t plan on making a ton of ukuleles, so I don’t want to end up with piles of power tools and buckets of liquids at the end of this project.
  • I still need to order the finish and wax.  I think I’ll also save some cardboard boxes to build something I can use and leave outside.  I’m thinking of a box with some holes for wooden dowels in the sides, so I can hang the ukulele while in between coats of oil, similar to the way Soph made hers.
• Tuners, bridge, turn around, and strings
  • As I filed down the inside of the sound hole, it’s been widened somewhat, so I’ll need to measure the spacing and re-print the plastic turn around.  No big deal.
  • Hacksaw off a ~2.5″ wide piece off the 3/16″ zinc round rod.
  • I’ve noticed the strings on my actual ukulele have slight grooves on their underside, on my most played chords.3 The strings are otherwise still good – so I suspect I could pull them off my ukulele and put them into use on my DIY ukulele.  That’s the plan, anyhow.
  • The tuners are easy enough to install.  I’ve test fit them a few times – and looking forward to adding them at last.

Let’s see what tomorrow brings!

1. It’s not displeasing or bothersome to me as it is. [↩]
2. Cotter pins [↩]
3. Am, F, C, G, E7 [↩]