Friday 24 July 2015

So much for that's it for today :-)

Not that you can see all that clearly in this photo but I've drawn out the rest of the cut lines for the neck and shoulders. I've also decided to use a pre cut plastic nut and have outlined a trench for it to sit in.

With a sharp craft knife and a no 7 blade I've started the frets slots with a few light cuts at their positions ready for the saw.


Click on the picture for a larger version

The gloss on the timber is the pva glue I used as a grain filler.It's turning out to be a bit slippery but it also protects the timber from slipping accidents.

It could be that the 200mm distance between the holes could have been 150mm but we'll see I guess

Some serious progress on the Travel Uke

In order to run the strings through the neck we need to drill some holes into the head stock end.
I'm using this tiny counter sink drill bit to drill through the top to make the holes and then from the back going deeper to engage the counter sink section to make the hole larger.

This way the string will have a knot tied into it at it's end so it gets trapped inside the hole.




Drilled in the front


From the back through to the countersink section of the drill bit.
I got a lot of tear out and in hindsight using another drill bit with more flutes may have prevented this. The timber is prone to this though so it may not have.



Cutting things to length. I have some issues with square and I'm not sure it's this cutting jig or my combination square.


I drilled the two holes with my 57mm Forstner bit. I drilled through until the tiny point poked out the other side then flipped the timber over and drilled in from that side. This reduced the chance of tear out. What a mess, it took longer to clean up than it did to drill the holes lol


The drill bit got a lot of residue on it that had to be cleaned off.



Here's the finished photo for today. So it's been layed out with pencil and rulers etc then cut to length then the holes were drilled into the head stock. Then the open section was started by cutting the two holes which will be joined up with a jig saw. I'll have to wait till next pay to get another jigsaw blade.

My dear mum came over earlier in the week and we had a meal at the football club next door (her shout) as she left she slipped my some cash to "Get some groceries" so I've ordered a cheap piezo pickup. I had to get this one so it would fit into the 19mm thickness of the timber I have. Time will tell if I've done the right thing and how I'll fix it, may come down to that universal fix it Silicone lol


The keen eyed of you will see I've got about 14 or 15 fret marks on the paper template This is something I'll adjust as I go and as the design dictates. The distance between the outside of each hole is 200mm





Thursday 23 July 2015

Got given some timber woo hoo

Abta ma enist appotmen  lol
After my dentist appointment this morning I walked to the local hardware store to look at what timber they had that would suit my travel Ukulele and as luck had it, I found a piece of Merbau a decking timber that seems ubiquitous in all our hardware stores. Funnily enough they had no Tasmanian Oak
I handed the guy pretending not to see me the piece for pricing and after some uming and aring he said "That's alright mate just don't tell anyone" and let me walk out with it. So FREE my favourite 4 letter word lately!! Woo Hoo!!!



I decided to use some white pva glue as a grain filler which will dry clear.
Merbau's grain is quite smooth but where there are pits, they are pronounced, 
so there's the need to grain fill at least for me. I'll be giving both
sides a couple of coats and sanding as needed. I'm hoping this will also help
with tear out when working on it with hole saws and/or forstner bits.


This piece is about 90mm x 19mm x 1000mm so plenty of room to play with.

The longest dowels I've ever seen :-)

I'm either going to have to reduce the length from a tenor down to a a soprano or get some more timber.
I was trimming the ends to remove the dowels and after making cut after cut I very nearly had a pencil stub lol these have to be the longest dowels I've ever seen.

I'm going into the dentist on Friday so before my bus back home I'll drop into the local Hardware store and look at alternatives to this chairs timber.




It does say something about how well this chair was made.

Thursday 16 July 2015

Update on the Travel Uke

I was vasilating over the decision of scale length on this build, originally it was going to be the
15 inches/381mm Daniels has but then I thought I much prefer the Tenor size of 17 inches/431.8mm
so in the end I compromised ;-P on 400mm/15.74 inch, a difference of  19mm about 3/4 of an inch



Checking out how I'm going to lay this out.




Ok a decision has been made so I trimmed the template I produced with 
FretFind2D and this link should give you my actual settings.




Here, I'm extending the fret lines across the timber because I'm going to cut these before 
dimensioning the neck, this also lets me check if thing are square.They are, yay!












Sunday 12 July 2015

Starting my Travel Ukulele by CircuitsAndStrings' Daniel Hulbert

Here's the YouTube link 
Click the link so it plays back in youtube so Daniel get the credits


and here is the link to his website


The Timber


This was a chair I found on the curb. It's probably made from Tasmanian oak
a very common furniture timber in Australia, the reality is though that Tassie oak can be from a variety of timbers and none of them are Oak Tassie oak wiki. The first piece I cut off nearly killed me I'm so out of condition lol.

The piece is 19mm (3/4in) thick 85mm (3 3/8in) wide and 560mm (1ft 10in) long
It is not quite quarter sawn but it's close enough. I'm going to break down this whole chair when I recover hahaha. 

I've downloaded all the plans from Daniel Hulbert's site but couldn't see a thickness written anywhere, not that that's a problem as the thickness will probably be determined by the input jack.

I have some friction tuners around here somewhere but will need to get the pickup and jack later on. I've already got fret wire that was meant for my electric uke. I bought some tattoo grips for a few dollars a while ago which explains why they still arent here lol I might need to re buy these and spend a bit more just so they'll show up lol

Did I mention it was going to be left handed?


Some of the timber will be used to make a wooden drill press vice like the one made by John Heisz see the video below.

                           Click the link so it plays back in youtube so John get the credits

I have an old clamp that doesn't work that well so I'll canabalise it for the screw mechanism.
I was thinking of making it so it can be angled similar to this one.

Click the link so it plays back in youtube so he get the credits

This might prove too difficult but it will be easy to pair back my plans if that's the case