So summer has become winter and I’m still not even close to finished with this. But I nibble away at it when I can.
I had a couple of vacation days late last week that were intercepted by a sick toddler, so progress was slowed. I got a couple of hours in today and was able to get the top glued on and trimmed flush with the sides. I had been eyeballing trim routers and even suggested my wife get me one from HF for $20 for Christmas, but she instead came through with a new BBQ Grill, so went with a sharp 3/4” chisel and trimmed the sides then hit them with the spindle sander attachment on the drill press to clean up the edges a bit.
I had planned to build a go-bar deck to use in conjunction with the radius dish to get the back braces glued on. But instead, used the radius dish to shape the back braces to the appropriate radius and have gone with clamps instead. Since the uke is so small, and the bracing pattern so simple, these hand clamps were pretty easy to use. The braces slipped around a bit (using titebond) and smeared glue around a bit, but overall it went pretty well. And i got to use my lone, home-made cam clamp to boot (also pictured in the previous post clamping the top bracing).
This should get the back set up to the correct radius and ready to attach to the rim. I have sanded the back side of the rim on the radius dish, so the radiused back should align pretty closely with the edge of the rim.
One other thing I did over this past weekend was to glue a soundhole reinforcement into the underside of the top. The top just seemed too thin and with the rosette inlay being sanded off, decided it needed a little extra support. This is some scrap ash I think, I had a small piece laying around so I resawed it with a hand saw and planed it fairly smooth on the non-glue side. The glue side was planed smooth prior to resawing.
Hoping to get the back glued on in the next few days, then on to shaping the neck and figuring out what to do for a fingerboard.