Attaching Head and Tail Blocks

Today we took the bent sides out of the side bender and fit them into the mold. Mike showed me how to butt the lower bout center seam so that it is almost undetectible and so the grain of the wood lines up on both sides and seems to be continuous.

Fit sides into mold

1. Put one side into mold and make sure the bottom of the side is flush with the bottom of the mold. Screw inside clamp with turnbuckle to hold in place. Push side at upper bout with your hand and mark center line. Do the same with the lower bout.

2. Now this is a cool trick! Take the side to your bandsaw and hold your side vertical to the blade. Cut your centerline like the blade is going through a thick piece of wood. The blade does not know how thick the wood is and will make a nice right angle cut that will match up perfectly with your other side. At the bottom of your uke you will have a seamless joint and so will not have to add that bottom graft. The only reason you will add that graft is for aesthetics and not to hide a seam that was less than perfect!

3. After the sides are in place you are ready to add your head and tail blocks. Put glue on curved side of tail block, line up center lines with a small clamp, add a large clamp securing and squeezing the tail block to the sides and two cam clamps at top (one on both sides of the small clamp) to totally secure block to sides. Repeat for the head block. Let cure at least a half an hour.

Marking the tops and backs:

1. Take the top and back, take your plexiglas pattern and center it on your center line (so important!) and put a pencil in a router bearing and drawing around pattern creating an outline that is 1/4" wider than the original uke shape. Also, mark where the soundhole should be on the top.

2. Take to the bandsaw and cut out your back and top on the pencil line.

Now for the rosette:

1. Position of rosette is marked on the soundboard, in this case the salvaged fir. Width is measured from the choice of material for the rosette. In this case I have chosen 1/8" abalone with 2 black strips on either side. Pick out cutter that will cut that width dimension. Mike uses the drill press and a cutter he built himself. He used a plexiglas circle on the bottom to get a nice crisp edge after cutting. The Plexiglas did burn the top of the plate though which he reassures me will come out after putting through the drum sander.

2. I next inlayed the rosette by adding the outside black line first, a piece of 1/8" wide curved abalone strip sandwiched in with the start of the other inside black strip. I went counter-clockwise fitting in the abalone little by little, a little tap here, a little sanding there. If you have had any experience with inlaying you know no matter how exact you are with cutting the channel, the abalone can be off by a little bit and you have to do what you can to make it fit. After you've got it all in a thin super glue is applied all over the top of the rosette and then a spray of accelerator after that and in just a minute it is taken to the drum sander. See the glued rosette picture up top.

Well, we ran into some trouble. The abalone I had inlaid was a laminate abalone. We knew it needed to be flush with the top in order to keep the color but maybe because the top wasn't exactly flat the nice blue abalone got sanded out. :( Oh well, no problem. Mike just took it back over to the drill press and routed the channel out again. But now we are done for the day so a new rosette will have to wait. Until next time.

As you can see i'm having a little trouble with this blog as far as adding the pictures. I wanted to have a running detail in pics as far as the how the process goes but can't figure out how to add more than 5 pictures. If you have trouble understanding something leave me a comment and I will get back to you. Thanks for the look!