The Uke twins

[morgan]

Today I'm a little sad as I just put my brother back on a plane to his home in Berlin, after spending a great and all-too-rare few weeks together with him here in NZ. One of the few drawbacks to living in beautiful New Zealand as a foreigner is the distance from your family. Originally I had planned to be presenting him with a guitar on his departure, but considering I have yet to finish my first one that was clearly a bit ambitious, so instead I though it might be a nice diversion and interesting project for us to build something together while he was here. We decided to have a go at ukes, and with some great help and advice from our local luthier and all-round nice guy Christian Druery we launched into building a pair of Concert Ukuleles.

We didn't meet the deadline of his flight today but we had a lot of fun and I'm really happy with the results so far. I've taken a bunch of pictures so I'll share our progress, and keep you updated as I finish off the remaining work myself and ship one of the twins home to my bro. Bearing in mind that he couldn't hammer a nail straight before we started and I am barely out of nappies in this lutherie business I think we're doing pretty well so far.

We built from begged, borrowed, donated and found wood but luckily we have some friends with excellent taste and great stashes to beg and borrow from The end result is the following combination of woods:

Top : quartersawn Ancient Kauri
Back & sides: Ancient Kauri
Neck: recovered Kauri
Fretboard, binding & bridge: Puriri

So, they are almost all native kiwi wood instruments (we did scrounge some Cedar which we used for bracing, and mitre 10 provided some pine which we turned into kerfing).

Anyway, enough talk, I know you just want the pics...

[morgan]

Joining the tops:


Figuring out how to make kerfing and what shapes to use:


Testing out our first piece of kerfing. As somebody once said - "If it bends, it's funny. If it breaks, it's not"


Our first kerfing jig was ok, but it wasn't ideal since it was controlling the depth of cut and not the depth of the piece left uncut and this didn't work well when our kerfing stock had slight variations in thickness. After searching the net, I came across this jig http://jcclarkukuleles.wordpress.com/my ... n-kerfing/ which turned out to be a great design and worked really well for us. We made a bunch, starting with some cheap $3 pine pieces from Mitre 10, ripping some strips off on the tablesaw and rounding the edges with a suitable bit in the laminate trimmer.

[morgan]

We wanted a simple and elegant rosette, and settled on a simple black-white-black. We achieved this by taking a piece of black-white-black-white purfling, sanding one of the white layers off, and bending it on an iron.

Routing the rosette channel:


Bending the rosette:


Inlaid rosette:


Rosette sanded flat:


Top trimmed to approximate size:

[morgan]

The sides were also bent on the same iron as the purfling/rosette. We were inexperienced and had a few small cracks (including some strange ones along the grain), but nothing some aliphatic gorilla glue and sanding couldn't sort out.

We then joined the sides to the butt and heel blocks, fixed them in the mould, and proceeded to add the kerfing for the top.





Once the top kerfing was dry and sanded flat we removed the body from the mould and marked the taper of the back onto the sides. We then sanded the sides to this level, put them back in the mould and added the kerfing for the back.

[morgan]

The top was braced with some cedar blagged from our neighbour who was given it as firewood by another neighbour involved in building Lockwood homes.



The bracing was glued on in a vacuum press. Here it is after it's been glued up and the top trimmed.



Here's where we're up to so far (the sides are just left on the top in this picture, and not glued on yet):



We have also glued up the neck roughly, and joined and braced the back but I don't have pictures handy of those right now,
so you'll have to wait for the next instalment. Thanks for watching.

[liam_fnq]

Lookin' real nice. Can't wait for more.

[Clancy]

Nicely done. I think your out of nappys now

[ProfChris]

I'm a rank amateur, having made only a handful of ukes, but that bracing and the bridge patch look rather beefy to me. As you've not glued the body up yet, might it be worth thinking about shaving it down?

I think Pete Howlett may have one or more videos on YouTube which show the bracing - worth a search.

My understanding is that with ukes the aim is to make them just strong enough not to fold up when tuned. I recently bought a Kumalae soprano, made in Hawaii in the 20s or 30s, which weighs in at only 225g (wooden pegs, so maybe the equivalent of 250g with metal tuners). It looks to me like you could lose 50g of wood from that bracing without risking structural failure.

[morgan]

ProfChris, thanks for your feedback and yes, I would agree that the bracing seems a little too chunky to my untrained eye also. We have basically been roughly following the plans from http://www.wsukes.com/plans.html and although we have deviated in some ways we kept the bracing to the dimensions listed. I have not closed up the ukes yet but now that the bracing is attached I'm a little nervous to start removing more material, and I also don't have any way to gauge how much I should remove. However, you did raise an interesting point - how can you tell when enough material is removed? Do most luthiers own a gram balance to assist with this? Would you recommend a particular one?

Clancy & Liam : glad you're enjoying it - it wasn't all as plain sailing as the pics might indicate and I had a quite a crisis working on the necks the other day which I thought would force me to scrap and rebuild them. More details to follow!

[Allen]

I don't want to be critical of your build, but if you're looking for some advice on shaping the braces, then take the one running down the centre seam and take it down to about 5 - 6 mm at the point directly above where the saddle will be. Then taper that point out to nothing by the time you reach each end.

For the bridge patch it doesn't need to be anything more than 2 mm thick at the deepest. I would be feathering off all material on all 4 sides. It is also a good idea not to have any sharp, square edges on your bridge patch like you've got. Makes it awfully easy for a crack to develop in the top right along an edge following the grain in the top. A little late to change that now, but something to keep in mind for the next one.

Your transverse braces have been cut too short and will not be able to be notched into the linings. Not a good design as you want that join to be very solid. Too late to change it now, so can be left alone. Remember for next time that those 2 braces, and all the ones on the back need to be inlet into the linings.

The rest of your construction looks very good.

Even with the bracing you've done, this will still sound like a uke and will be a joy to play. The advice is just for refining what you've already achieved.

[morgan]

Allen, this is great stuff and exactly why I post on this forum. Please be as critical as you like as this is a fantastic learning resource for me These will be the first 2 instruments I'll have actually finished so I'm under no illusions as to their quality (especially when I look at things like the fantastic Stephen Kinnaird build ). I'm at the bottom of a very tall ladder, just taking the first step.

The transverse bracing were pictured like this in the plans as far as I remember (don't have them in front of me right now). Is it pretty much a given that you always want these bracings to be notched in to the linings in guitars and Ukes? There were a couple of other things in the plans that seemed a little odd and were changed on advice from Christian, so I'm wondering how good these plans are

I'm sure I'll build more ukes when I finish these two and the Selmer I started ages ago, and once I get past the "Wohoo I just built an instrument that hasn't actually fallen apart!" buzz I'll certainly be looking to refine all the elements of the construction in subsequent builds. Good to know where to concentrate on.

[ProfChris]

For shaving down braces I use a little rosewood and brass block plane about 5cm long - something like AusD10 via eBay I'd think. Then a chisel on the ends if I'm feeling brave.

I just shave them down until I start to think "Are these getting too small?" Ideally I'd then take some more off, but I'm not that brave yet.

If you think about it, the string tension on a soprano or concert uke is pretty low, so you don't need much in the way of bracing. On sopranos mine start off about 10mm tall and 4-6mm wide, and then I slice the angle off with the block plan to make a cut-off triangle cross section. Then I round over the top, maybe take it down a bit more, and so-on.

I think a lot depends on how stiff the top is to start with. I rap it with my knuckle and shave away at the bracing until it feels musical, if you see what I mean.

[Allen]

A lot of uke plans don't show the transverse braces extending into the linings, and you also see a lot of them that aren't built that way either, but it's pretty bad idea. If the top is thick you can get away with it, but the sound and volume suffers from a thick top. Building with a thin top improves both of those things, but posses a problem with bracing being just strong enough.

The uke, or guitar for that matter is wanting to fold itself in half round about the waist from the string tension. Then you've cut a big hole in the top to compound the problem, further weakening the structure. There's going to be some dissent in the ranks on whether you get any sound coming off the sound board above the waist, and I'm sure you do in the very upper bout if you build for it. But I don't want the area between the two transverse braces to move around on me at all. If the top is very thin, then use a sound hole patch. Transverse braces are about 6 x 6 mm. Round over on top if you like. Scallop or taper the ends but make sure that they extend into the linings.

Soprano's only require a bridge patch. No other fan bracing. Concerts I'm finding are working best braced the same way. Tenors do get 3 fan braces, but it's pretty light.

All tops get a radius formed into the lower bout by pressing in the bridge patch.

[morgan]

Brilliant information Allen, thanks for that. My next one's going to be so much better

Despite the bracing of the current one(s), I have been very pleasantly surprised by the tone out of the top when tapping it - it sounds like a tightly stretched skin on a drum with a well defined pitch and has both good volume and sustain.

[morgan]

Goodness, I've just looked up the last post I made here and it's been half a year. Time to follow up. First things first... I actually managed to finish my very first instrument! Such a great feeling.

Life gets in the way of all your plans, but to make a long story short after a bout of family illness we all decided to bugger off on short notice from the miserable dampness of NZ winter and took a trip back to Europe for a couple of months. I was determined not to let the opportunity pass to personally hand-deliver a ukulele to my brother in Berlin so I made it my goal to finish one of them off before my journey. After a frantic rush and lots of help from local luthier and all-around-nice-guy Christian Druery I succeeded.

I managed to pack a uke hardcase into my conventional luggage so my brother had literally no idea until I opened my luggage in from of him and handed him the instrument. He was delighted.

I am so happy with the finished product, and it came out so much better than I imagined before I started. Of course there were plenty of problems along the way, but also plenty of solutions and loads of learning opportunities. I feel so much more confident after the 1st one that I can't wait to complete the second one (which is still in bits in my garage). With the glacial pace of my lutherie I may even get that done this century!

I have taken millions of construction pics, but most of them are probably boring to you old hands here, so I think I'll just follow up here with with a couple of pics of the finished instrument unless anybody is hugely interested in any particular area.





In my final rush I didn't get to set it up fully, so my brother will re-carve the nut and saddle when he has an opportunity, and we decided to switch out the tuning pegs for geared tuners (friction tuners are indeed horrible things). However, despite this and even in the state I delivered it in it played really nicely, sounded great, and was a million times beter than the cheap (and not quite so cheap) ones I had tried in shops before.

It is an immensely satisfying experience to hold a finished instrument in your hand that you built yourself. Imagine how good the next one could be now that you've accumulated all this knowledge, or the one after that, or...

[Clancy]

Good on ya for seeing it through.....and well done.

[ProfChris]

Nicely done - it looks like it's meant to be played (and some don't, they're aimed mainly at the eye). And so satisfying that it sounds good.

How brave were you in attacking the bracing? On my most recent soprano I took my single top brace down to about 3mm x 6mm, rounded off and scalloped at the ends, with a 2mm bridge patch. The uke is mahogany with no finger-board, but metal friction tuners (I've no objection, they work fine for me) and comes in at 305 gm, which I think is pretty much in the right range. That one sings nicely.


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