I finished a tenor guitar and a banjo tonight. This is me playing a bit on the tenor. It sounds much better than I anticipated!

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Ukulele #1: Lusitania (Taken with instagram) (1 of 7 first-batch instruments)

Finally, one of them is done! It’s no Kala, but like Ira says: “It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”

Round 2 will be happening in the fall!

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Marking off fret distances - I had to buy a ruler graded in 1/100 of an inch. (Taken with instagram)

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Staining a few necks, putting polyurethane on all of them. (Taken with instagram)

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It’s been about a minute since I talked about building instruments (if you want way too many updates, my Instagram uname is joeblubaugh). After sawing your neck blank to create the “head on” profile of a neck, the next thing to do is carve it, creating the curved shape that the thumb rests on. There are a number of ways to do this, and I took my pointers from this faceting method. Like the author, I used a belt sander to do the majority of my carving. The stationary belt sander is probably the most versatile woodworking power tool I know of. You can use a hand saw for most of the cuts you need or make a low-cost cross-cut jig and get a $30 circular saw before you mess with a table saw. There is some amount of finesse in this whole process - you just have to know what a good neck feels like.

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Band saws, you guys.

Neck Construction:

The most frustrating thing about building something out of wood is that wood is unstable. It can start out straight but then bend, twist, swell, and shrink. If you’ve ever bought 2x4s from a hardware store, you’ve probably seen both bent and twisted boards all over the place.

The first way to make a stable board is to saw it properly, but that won’t solve all problems, especially for longer boards. Another thing you can do is construct pieces out of several boards, and that’s what I’ve chosen to do with the necks here. Pictured above are a banjo and ukulele neck blank. Smaller pieces of wood have less internal stress, so if you join them properly (without adding extra stress) you can get a larger, more stable piece of wood.

These necks are made by jointing (flattening) and then gluing together an oak board and a poplar board. I went for the sap wood poplar because it’s not as green, though sap wood is less stable than heart wood. For the smaller ukulele necks, I also split the boards down the middle and glued a thin strip of poplar between them. This is mostly for looks.

The fret boards have also been glued on top before rough cutting - some people prefer to do all the fretboard sawing and inlaying before they attach it to the neck. I may try that on the next set of necks to see which I prefer.

In addition to the added stability, using these differently-colored woods is going to create a contrast in the finished necks that I’m really looking forward to. This week I’ll be bandsawing the necks into a rough shape to get ready for carving them on the belt sander next week.

Waiting For the Glue to Dry - Making necks leaves you with a lot of downtime.

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Plans for a concert size cigar box ukulele. The crucial measurement here is the distance from the nut to the edge of the cigar box, which determines how many frets the fingerboard will have and where on the surface of the box the bridge will fall.

It’s critical to plan out all your dimensions ahead of time - and to take a lot of measurements of your cigar boxes. Lid thicknesses vary dramatically, and you want the neck to enter so that the finger board will sit flush or slightly raised from the edge of the box. The higher the fingerboard sits above the box, the taller your bridge needs to be.