I pretty much only make progress on my ukulele on the weekends – and even then only for a short period in morning since it gets so hot so quickly.1 Unfortunately, last Sunday I didn’t get to it – and as a result spent the workweek daydreaming about what I’d do on Saturday morning.

Here’s what I planned to do:

• Filing and sanding.  Of course.
• Increase the diameters for the holes for the tuners.  After a few test fittings, I found the holes for the tuners were pretty snug.  I wanted to widen these just a little to make them easier to insert, hoping they would end up flush against the ukulele body.
• Counter sink the string holes as Daniel did on his Deluxe Travel Ukulele.
• Cut the 3″ off the zinc plated round-rod.

I’m pleased with my progress so far – it’s not onerous, but it is slow.  As with so many things, it’s the journey, not the destination.

• Cutting the round rod with the hacksaw went reasonably smoothly.  Rather than going for a particular length, I aimed for a length that would go from either side of the body, with about a quarter inch to spare.  I marked the spot with a sharpie, cut until I got mostly through, and bent the soft metal until it popped off.  I used my full hacksaw instead of my smaller hacksaw and it went quickly.  Then I filed down both ends so it wouldn’t be sharp.  I don’t like any of the hardware store options and will be designing a 3D printed piece to hold it in place.
• Counter sinking the string holes and widening the tuner holes went easy enough.  I really should have done these at the beginning, but it’s all a learning experience.  I suppose I could have drilled out the turn around hole some, but the machines screws went in and came out fine already.
• The filing and sanding isn’t difficult, it’s just slow.
  • In the photos below you’ll notice I used a soft pencil to draw in and around some of the saw and file gouge marks.  I used my medium and fine files, then started with 100 grit, then 120 grit.  I still some light gouge marks on the outside to remove, some unevenness to the neck to straighten out, and much of the interior of the body to file, shape and sand.  I also made sure to follow Adam Savage’s advice and regularly swap out the sandpaper.  There’s no point in rubbing this thing with sandless paper.2
  • The interior really jumps out as the least attractive part right now.
  • I gave the outside of the entire board a good sanding to smooth it out – except for the fretboard area.  I’m loathe to sand this part and remove the markings for the frets.  The fret and bridge positions are critical to getting the sound right and I don’t want to screw this up.
  • I took turns filing and sanding to get the shape I wanted – then started using the pencil to highlight the areas needing attention, sanding, and then an old toothbrush to remove dust.  I have a small supply of the kid’s old toothbrushes for these kinds of tasks.  After they’re done with them, I’ll wash them and use my heavy duty clippers to cut them off about 1-2 inches below the bristles.  I keep one with my drill bit set, so I can remove dust and debris from the bits before they go back in.
  • Anyhow, by the time I was done with the neck, I was genuinely surprised how nice it felt to hold.  It kinda feels like a ukulele.

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What’s next?  I’m glad you asked!

• Still more filing, pencil marks, sanding, brushing.
  • Using my small thin round files on the string holes so they’re not so sharp.
  • With particular attention paid to the inside of the body (where it’s pretty rough) and the head (which needs a lot of shaping).
  • I’m genuinely undecided about the bottom of the ukulele – whether I want to keep it flat or round it off.  It’s a lot of wood to remove by file, so I’d probably need to cut into it again if I decided I didn’t like it.
• Gluing the zero fret and frets.
• Measuring and printing a new turn around.  I filed away enough of the interior that although the original turn around would work, it would look a lot better with a new one.
• Ordering the finish and wax.  I’ll probably go with Daniel’s suggestion for Birchwood Casey gun stock finish and gun stock wax.  They’re inexpensive, come in small bottles, and are easy to order off Amazon.  I suspect a single bottle of each would be good enough for many more ukuleles than I’m likely to build.
• I like the idea of black hardware.  I might still pick up some black oxide finish machine screws.  Or, I might just await until I finish this ukulele and see how it sounds.
• Once the finish and wax come, it’s back to more sanding, finish, sand, finish, then wax.  :)

Things I would do differently the next time around:

• I would definitely NOT use my awl to put such large holes into the wood.  I would have not filed or sanded off as much in many areas if I hadn’t put some of the pock marks into the wood.  I don’t know a great way to transfer the design to the wood – but I’m certain this is a problem that’s been solved in the last several thousand years by better minds.
• Throughout this entire process I keep thinking “Dang, this would be a lot easier / faster / better looking with a bench vise.”  It would have been very helpful to have it for holding the plank while I cut with the coping saw, allowing me to keep the blade perpendicular to the wood, rather than at an angle as I held the plank with one hand and the saw pivoted slightly.  It would have been helpful with the drilling, filing, cutting the round rod, and sanding.
• If I had a workshop or garage space I would immediately put in a work bench, bench vice, a used drill press, and a nearby station for my shop vac.  I’d be tempted to add a used band saw too.  I’ll add these to the wishlist for my next home.

1. It’s going to be 105 degrees in Northern California today! [↩]
2. Also known as “paper” [↩]

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 [↩]

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

What would one of my blog posts look like, if it didn’t involve wild digressions?  The saying, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” is attributed to Mike Tyson, speaking of the impending fight with Evander Holyfield.1

I’ll post some pictures, but suffice it to say very little has gone according to plan.  :)

I got started by putting together a pattern based on Dan Hulbert’s designs.  A few notes about how I put it together:

1. Designs
   1. I started with Dan’s designs, specifically the “backpacker travel ukulele,” added a rounded base similar to his concert sized “travel ukulele,” and then added a number of annotations.  I wanted to have a way to visualize the size of the bolts, hardware, etc.  I also added a grid showing the various drill bits, keyed to the various hardware.
2. Process
   1. I created the above described design in Inkscape, using different layers for different aspects of the design.
   2. Printed the design on two sheets of paper, lined them up, and glued them together. I used a hole punch in the top sheet, to help line them up easily. I made sure to put the hole punches through parts with lots of detail, but nothing critical to the pattern.
      1. There are rulers on every side of the diagram, and a 100mm wide gray box, because the first several times I printed it out the scaling was all wrong.
      2. I’m not sure why the scaling was wrong – it could have been somewhere in the conversion process from SVG to PDF to a two-page PDF. In the end, I just measured the box, found it was too small, scaled up the next print, and it was close enough to 100mm that it was fine with me.
   3. I picked up the wood (a 3/4″ x 3″ x 24″ mahogany plank from Rockler Woodworking), hardware from Home Depot (I’m pretty sure they lost money shipping me a 4′ long steel bar), and 3D printed the turn around.
   4. I used a pencil to trace the reverse side of the design. This way, I would be sure not to put glue in any of the areas that would touch the final design. I then applied glue and glued the pattern to the wood using a glue stick.
   5. I used a utility blade to cut out the center “sound hole” paper outline, making it easy to cut out the center.
   6. Used an awl to poke holes through the pattern where the strings go above the zero fret, on either side of the frets (so I could draw a line on the wood between these indentations for the fret locations), and other locations where I needed to drill holes.
   7. Taped the bottom of the wood, so that holes drilled and saw cuts wouldn’t cause the wood to splinter. I really should have taped the top too, but I’m learning!
   8. Drilled a hole in the “sound hole” to put saw blade through.
   9. I don’t have a scroll saw, router, drill press, or CNC – any of which would have made the rest of the process a snap. Instead, I bought a coping saw and cut part of the sound hole out.
   10. Snapped the blade. Bought some new blades. Cut the rest of the sound hole out, snapping another blade in the process.
   11. I installed the turn around – which looks like it is going to work well.

The result is … wildly uneven.

1. Improvements
   1. As with any project, I find that as I am going through the first iteration2 I discover a few ways to improve the existing plans.  Here are some ideas I had along the way:
      1. Creating the template so that I can fold the left and right sides down and they will indicate the precise location for the tuners and turn around holes.
      2. Including dotted lines from the widest part of the design all the way up – so I can be sure the pattern is straight all the way up the plank of wood.
      3. Create a cross hair pattern for the places where I need to drill, to make my awl punches through the design more precise.
      4. Add measurements to the gray scale boxes.  (Quick tip – the boxes are exactly 100mm long with 0.0mm thick outlines.  This prevents them from being draw very slightly too wide).
      5. Tape the top and bottom of the board, as well as sides, before drilling and cutting, to prevent the wood from splitting or splintering.
      6. Always print at least one extra3 of the pattern.4

1. For a short, fun, deep dive on the origins of these quotes, I’d recommend this post by QuoteInvestigator. [↩]
2. Sometimes the only iteration… [↩]
3. Probably two extra [↩]
4. Two is one and one is none. [↩]