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

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