Today I decided to finally do something handy and I started building a ukulele. Several years ago, my Dad gave me a Grizzly ukulele kit and it has sat uncompleted for quite some time. Recently, I have been regretting not using my workbench for anything, so this project serves a double purpose.
Getting the materials together
After a run to our local Big Lots and Walmart, I had the necessary sandpaper, tools, and lacquer to finish the project. I got my workbench cleared off and I was off to work!
Here’s all of the materials laid out ready to go. You can see the Grizzly Kit provides the body and neck in rough form.
Here’s the stuff needed for the first major step: sanding. All of the main wooden parts came rough-sanded, but there was a lot of finish sanding needed. This part was actually quite fun, one of the steps included wiping down the parts with a wet cloth to remove all the dust and raise the grain for final sanding and boy is this wood pretty!
Here are the parts after final sanding. Not much appreciable difference, but it does look better up close.
Body/Neck Assembly
Marking the center line of the ukulele and the neck. Measure twice, glue once! (In my case, it was measure thrice…)
Using a 15′ strap clamp to hold the neck to the body. It took me several tries to figure out how the strap clamp was meant to ratchet and hold the parts together, but I figured it out. The most difficult part of this process was cleaning up the neck joint with the glue that squeezed out during this process. About an hour with an exacto knife, sandpaper, and a wet paper towel did the trick.
The fretboard markers… the kit came with three 1/8″ fret markers, and the fretboard came with guide holes already drilled. All that was left for me to do was to break out the drill press with an 1/8″ bit, drill out the holes a bit, and then a drop of glue made short work of this step.
Gluing the fretboard to the neck was messy, but easy. I found these little clamps at Big Lots for $1.80 apiece and they worked great for this. I had to use a wood shim and rubber band to hold the fretboard flush with the body in the right spot. There’s going to be more time with an exacto knife in my future to clean up the rest of the glued joints, but this will be made significantly easier because the next step is to file down the edges of the neck flush with the fretboard. That should get rid of most of the troublesome glue, but that’s going to be best left for another day.
So far it’s been a fun project, I’m looking forward to finishing it over the next few evenings which might stretch into next weekend. Fun stuff!
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