Building a Travel Ukulele: Cutting Stuff

Today was mostly about just cutting and shaping the piece of wood.  Gallery with descriptions below.

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What I didn’t really show in these pictures was me shaving the wood with several different hand files and rasps.  One side of the “sound hole” was a lot wider than the other – too wide to put the tuner through.  I made heavy use of my most course rasp to remove a lot of wood from that side, then the more fine rasps to smooth everything out.  I used the smallest of my files to widen the holes for the tuning machines and turn around a little.  These will come in very handy when it’s time to shape the underside of the neck.

I taped the board to protect the pattern, then drew the rough outline on the masking tape.  I did this on the reverse too.

Cutting out the sides of the neck was very slow going with the blade rotated 90 degrees.  As I was cutting, I did think again about how much easier it would be with band saw.  However, I really did want to make this ukulele with hand tools (plus my electric drill), if at all possible.  Plus, I don’t want to buy or even store equipment I’m not going to use all that often.

For anyone following along at home, I think a router would probably be the single best power tool to help on this project.  A quick search revealed routers started at about $60 and scroll saws started at about $110.  If I were to try and make another ukulele, it might be worthwhile to pick up a router.  It probably would have reduced a multi-day coping saw / hacksaw process into about 20 minutes.

Of course, the best overall tool might well be a CNC router.  ;)  That would have made quick work of the entire process… 1

1. Learning Curves and Ukuleles
2. Building a Travel Ukulele: Getting Started
3. Building a Travel Ukulele: Cutting Stuff
4. Building a Travel Ukulele: Cutting, Filing, Shaping
5. Building a Travel Ukulele: Filing, sanding, filing, sanding, filing…
6. Building a Travel Ukulele: Sanding.
7. Building a Travel Ukulele: Test Fitting
8. Building a Travel Ukulele: Preparation, Marking and Cutting Frets
9. Building a Travel Ukulele: Shaping Frets, Sanding
10. Building a Travel Ukulele: Building a Drill
11. Building a Travel Ukulele: No Turning Back
12. Building a Travel Ukulele: Sanding, sanding, and finishing
13. Building a Travel Ukulele: Finishing, sanding, painting, etc
14. Building a Travel Ukulele: So Much Experimentation, Bridges, Printing, and Sanding
15. Building a Travel Ukulele: Plancratineering
16. Building a Travel Ukulele: Swapping Hardware, Fret Experiments
17. Building a Travel Ukulele: Bridge, Stringing It Up, and a Sound Test!
18. Building a Travel Ukulele: Improvements
19. Building a Travel Ukulele: Back to Basics
20. DIY Soprano Scale Travel Ukulele
21. Repairing My DIY Travel Uke

1. I’d say once or twice a year I’m tempted to purchase a Maslow CNC kit. [↩]