Ukulele Part 2: Jigs, Sides, braces

That's dangerous looking...

What you are looking at is a body mold.  Briefly - it is a plywood board with four angle brackets screwed to it.  I then attached two rectangular pieces of scrap wood to the ends and two curved pieces of scrap wood to the sides.  FYI - the curved bits are from a piece of extra banister that I had lying around from some house projects.  You could just use a bit of dowel and tape it to the angle bracket (stewmac suggests this method, in fact).

I wouldn't want to be in the middle of that.

As you can see from the paper taped to the center of this torture device - we'll be putting the Uke body in there at some point.  This jig is used for a few things.  It helps the sides keep their shape as you glue them together.  It also keeps everything contained when you glue in the linings (see Part 3).

Finally, it is used when we glue the top and back to the sides (see Part 4).  Knowing what I know now - I would have cut the scrap wood a little shorter than I did.  The Angle brackets are 2.5 inches.  I would cut the scrap wood to 2.5 inches as well (or maybe a bit shorter).  They all ended up being too long to use for gluing the top down - so I had to remove them when I got to that step.

Sigmund the sea monster

Again, I didn't take enough pictures - so what you don't see are the two sides before they were glued together.  The sides came pre-bent and fit nice and snug inside the mold.  I did have to cut the neck-block and the end-block to the same hight as the sides (they come about an inch too long).  But what you are seeing above is the clamping of the sides to the neck and end blocks.  When it's all dried and released from the mold it looks like this: 

Sure is shaped like a Ukulele!

Sometime in the near future, the top and back will be glued to this bad boy and we'll have a ukulele body.  For now, it will sit and wait while I finish up the bracing for said top and back.

Perfection is for amateurs

As I mentioned before - one of the braces on the back moved as I was gluing it down.  It should be fine (some acoustic guitars have bracing that goes across at an angle).  The point is to make the top and back strong - and right now - they are strong.  Too strong.  I'm going to shave those braces in the near future. Shaving them down should make the instrument more responsive - which should make the uke sound better.  We shall see!

Kind of looks like an Anime cyclops cat.

Same goes for the top.  Those braces are huge!  I'm going to make them a bit shorter and thinner.

Here's hoping that they are not too thin.  For the curious - here is Dana Bourgeois describing how and why you would want to do such a thing.  He explains it much better than me.

Soon...