Concert Ukulele, Neck shaping *UPDATE*

So last night I got the fretting/binding done and glued the fretboard down onto the neck.  Slept forever today and woke up at 3:30pm, guess my cat decided to let me sleep for once.  Took my allergy meds and got to work immediately downsizing the overhang so the neck and fretboard were as flush as i could get em.  I had planned on using my orbital sander like I did on Tom's, but the sandpaper I bought isn't as high quality as 3m, so I ended up block planing the crap out of it.  Once it was smooth enough for my liking, I went at it with my rasps and files.  Last weekend I had watched an episode of The Woodwright's Shop with Roy Underhill and they were taling about how handcut rasps seem to cut more thoroughly than machine cut, so I tried out my shitty 3 dollar Harbor Freight rasp set over the more expensive Home Depot set.  Needless to say, I no longer think the cheap ones are so shitty.  Anyways, here's a bunch of pics, there's still some more filing and sanding to do, but its about 90% done.

And here's today's work so far.  As I said, still a little work needs to be done to clean up as many tool marks as possible.

I'm going to try to condense the next several blog posts, I have something special planned for my 100th entry.

*UPDATE*

Just slotted the headstock and drilled for tuners.  Learned a new technique involving the drill press and chisels, so I can ditch the sloppy routing.

Now to sand out any rough spots.

Tom's Ukulele, Fretting

So I guess I forgot to take a couple pics, but I guess I don't want EVERY step being shown.  Anyways, last I left off, I had bound the fingerboard and inlayed it.  Once I had sanded the binding down flush and polished up the fretboard, I went ahead and glued it onto the neck.  After letting that set overnight, I trimmed down the neck a little bit and hammered and glued in all the frets.

It took some work to get a couple of the frets in, one of my strips/rolls of fretwire had a super tight radius, so the last few frets kept popping out. I ended up using a thicker viscosity (sp?) superglue on those and clamped them in overnight.

This morning I did all the levelling/bevelling/crowning on them.  I ended up having to use a traditional 3 sided file for some of the troublesome frets to get them to fit into my crowning file.  After that, I gave the whole fretboard a polishing, and set up a jig for my handheld belt sander to make it work as a stationary sander and sanded the rest of the neck flush with the fretboard.  Now its ready for shaping, which I'll tackle after lunch.