A pile of wood destined for Scandinavia

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:

1. Backs and fronts pre-thicknessed to 2.6mm


2. Sides pre-thicknessed to 2.3mm


3. Necks planed to 350mm x 63mm x 34mm


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


5. 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:

1. Front brace wood


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


3. End blocks


4. Linings


5. Bridges


6. 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

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

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!

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

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

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

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!