Saturday, June 25, 2016

Ukulele Setback

I was going to post a lovely picture the Electric Ukulele that I was working on when it broke mid-cut. If you can tell by the first picture, It's a G-Clef. The C was going to hold the bridge, about at the E was the pickup, and the nut was going to be roughly at the F. The difficult part (I thought) was going to be playing the higher notes with the large arc on the right side. Instead, it turns out that the hardest part was getting the thing cut in the first place.
It's not that big of a deal really as I'll just have to glue it together and continue on, but I'll also need to secure the start of the calligraphy/bridge as there will be tension on that area and I don't want to leave it all up to a little bit of glue to hold it in one piece. The second issue is that it'll look ugly not. I mean what good is having an interesting looking instrument if it's not a good-looking interesting looking instrument? I guess it's not really the looks, but the sound of the instrument that matters.
I'm going to cool off because I chose the hottest day so far this year to be outside (under a nectarine tree). And I don't mean cooling off as in relieving stress as it's better that this design flaw was discovered now as opposed to after playing it for a few days, needing to disassemble it, fix the issue, dress it up, reassemble, then be grumpy because of it.


Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Indolence, my dear friend and hated foe

To be fair, it isn't entirely my habitual sloth that is preventing me from getting anything done, but it is the bulk. I could blame it on the weather (including the rain) and my busy schedule, but if I were sincere on building this I would've made more progress by now. I need to make a schedule or something and rigidly adhere to it and maybe then I'll have another finished instrument. If you fail to plan you plan to fail I guess.
I do know the next step for this guitar though; I need to cut out the molds for the sound box. There isn't much of a curve to it, but to have a consistent bend I'll need a good mold. It's true that I also need to build the steam box, but I think the mold is higher priority. After the face and back to the bound box are shaped correctly, I'll trace the curvatures and cut and bend the sides. I still need to do some significant work on the neck/fretboard area, but now I have the fret wire.
Speaking of purchases, my distraction played around with my shopping cart and I added another project to my to-do list (lucky me huh?). I purchased the 4-string bridge, single-bar 4-string pickup and 4 tuning pins to make a tiny little ukulele. I'm going to try to do something fun so I'll share my blueprint once I get a good idea.