A quick update on rosettes

Abalone and ebony rosette for Richard's ukulele

It's downright weird what I remember from science courses in high school. I always liked chemistry better than physics (too much math involved in physics.) One of the things that has stuck in my brain is the idea of a rate-determining step in a chemical reaction. As I understand it, the reaction can't go faster than the slowest bit of it. In terms of where I am in the ukulele building process the rosette is my rate-determining step. I need to get the rosette inlaid into the top before I can put the top on the building form and start bracing it. Once the braces are in then I can bend the sides and attach the sides to the top.

The top is pretty thin around 2mm. The reason I know that is that I measured it with my digital calliper which happened to be set to metric and I saw no need to change the units to imperial although that's what I normally use. With the same handy device I measured the rosette at its thinnest point .97mm. That means I have very little room for error or I'm going to have a hole in the top other than the sound hole which is supposed to be there. It's a good thing I like to putter along because this particular exercise has required quite a lot of puttering. I started Tuesday by drawing around the rosette with an X-acto knife and then deepening the line. When I first took the rosette off the top I could hardly see the line. Not deep enough so I carefully put the rosette back in place. Jake gave me the tip of putting 4 tiny dabs of glue on the rosette so it wouldn't move around while I was trying to scribe a line around it. That worked well and I was able to get the glue off when I picked up the rosette and I was also able to get the rosette back in exactly the same place with 4 more tiny dabs of glue for the second round of scribing. Then I removed the rosette and went at it again, this time using the cut lines to guide the knife going slowly and gently. Many light passes later I had a pretty good outline. Then I began to remove a bit of the waste up to the cut lines with a chisels.

Router plane, chisels, X-acto knife, digital calliper

I'm not sure how long that took me but I was pretty much cross-eyed by the time I was ready to come home. I carried on with that process yesterday and, once I had the shoulders delineated, I began to remove wood from the middle of the channel. I still had to be careful because it would have been easy enough to push a little too hard and tear the grain. That did happen in one spot but I think I know
how to fix it. I used both my chisels and my router plane for this job. To get the depth of the cut I wanted with the router plane I used feeler gauges, thin bits of metal graduated in thousands of an inch. I didn't need to worry about what the numbers said because I put combinations of the metal leaves beside the top until they were about half way up and then set the cutter accordingly.

When I'm doing work like this and it's going well I'm amazed by the effectiveness of some of the tools I use and I feel a real fondness for them. I experienced that as I worked with the router plane. How many people before me have used a tool like this to build instruments and furniture? How many people has it taken over the years to perfect the design? And, how many people in this age of CNC routers are turning back to hand tools simply for the delight of creating something with only hands and a sharp blade? I know it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done. The downside is that I find it pretty hard on my arthritic thumbs.

Not deep enough yet

Every once in a while I checked to see how thin I was making the top and whether or not the rosette fit into the cavity. I got the outline done pretty well and the rosette slipped in without too much trouble. Force it in an it's likely to break ... again. I think the number of times I've broken it, either on purpose to fix or redo something or accidentally stands at about 7. There was too much of it sticking up though. In woodwork-speak it was too 'proud.' The only choice was to do some more careful excavating, check the fit and repeat. The hardest part was trying to keep the walls of the cavity perpendicular and smooth. I resorted to using the chisel to pare down the walls because the chisel, unlike the knife has a flat back so it will go straight down the wall as long as I hold it straight. The knife has a V point so you get a sloped wall.

Lampshade anyone?

I thought it might be interesting to hold the top up to the light so see how thin it was getting. In one spot it was really thin and I put an X in pencil there I wouldn't take off any more material. Bit by bit I lowered the floor of the channel until I completely lost my nerve. There are no holes in the top but it sure is thin and I'm not prepared to try to get it any thinner. The rosette is still proud and I hope there is enough thickness to it that when I sand it down to make it level with the top I won't sand through it. The process can be a nerve-wracking and I didn't exactly pick an easy rosette to start on. Nonetheless, it's absolutely engaging work and, outside of the nervous-making quality of it, I'm thoroughly enjoying myself. Today I glue the rosette into the top. I can already think of a number of other possible rosette designs and I can't wait to try some of them out. I guess I'll just have to keep building instruments so I have an excuse to make rosettes. In the meantime I can get on with the next steps in building the two instruments I already have on the go. Stay tuned.

Machines and rosettes

I have an uneasy relationship with woodworking machines. I know they will do things quickly and they will reliably repeat operations. That is, once you get them set up. Often I can make a cut more quickly with a hand saw than I can with the table saw. I admit that's partly because the table saw is often covered with stuff. It's a horizontal surface and that's what tends to happen to every horizontal surface in my shop. Aside from that, if the piece is short or thin it's safer to cut it with a hand saw.

I have a well-equipped shop and I use some of the machines often. The band saw gets a lot of use and the table saw gets quite a bit if I'm cutting up panels or making repetitive cuts. I like my battery-powered drill/drivers. On the other hand, the bench top jointer hardly ever gets taken out. I prefer to use a hand plane and I'm reluctant to use the planer although I did have to admit defeat when I was making a couple of end-grain cutting boards and was faced with the task of surfacing them with hand planes.

My first wooden rosette

I've been wrestling with the old dilemma again this past week. My ukulele journey involves learning how to make rosettes to decorate the sound holes of instruments. Most folks use a router to cut the ring in the top into which the rosette gets inlaid. It's efficient; it's accurate. Jake has a Dremel tool with a router base and a circle cutting jig. I can learn to use his. I find myself resisting. Routers freak me out a bit. They're noisy and those bits spin so fast. If I don't get the bit in right... If I'm honest there's more to it than fear and worry about safety. I'm enamoured with the idea of being able to accomplish most woodworking tasks with a relatively simple set of hand tools. Of course, people who can do this started when they were in their teens and I don't have 30 or 40 years to perfect the skills. Still, it's an idea that won't let go of me. I don't have to make my living through my craft and it really doesn't matter how quickly or how slowly I get things done. So for the last 5 days I've been in the shop trying to create a manual circle cutting jig. 

This didn't work

I need a compass, or something like it, with a cutting blade. I need a way to keep the point from moving and a way to keep the cutter from shifting while I'm rotating it around the centre point. I thought I had a way that would work: take a wooden beam, attach a cutter to the end of it and put a track in the beam that allows the pin to move back and forth to change the size of the circle. Simple enough. Well, not really. I screwed the blade onto the end of the beam and broke the blade. Not one to give up, I laminated the part of the blade that was left between two thin pieces of wood and screwed that to the beam. How to get the point to stay put? I haven't figured that one out yet, at least not on the original design. I tried pinching the arms together with a screw – not tight enough. I tried a few other things as well and gained a new appreciation of Thomas Edison who learned hundreds of ways that didn't work to make a light bulb. Next I tried using a bolt as a centre and drilling a hole in a board to accept the bolt. The top would have a corresponding hole in it that would slip over the shaft of the bolt so I could rotate the cutter. This is the system Jake uses with his router. The drill bits I have are either too big, there is slop in the pin, or too small I have to thread the bolt into the hole in the wood and that means it won't turn freely.

This worked

After some checking on lutherie forums, I came across the suggestion to use a 'lolly' stick and an X-acto blade. I grabbed a tongue depressor (yes I have a bunch around left over from some craft project or other at school) and carefully poked a hole in it with a push pin. On the opposite end I cut a slit just big enough to take the point of an X-acto knife blade. I stuck the pin into a piece of wood, held the X-acto knife in place and scribed a perfect circle. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.

I'm still not satisfied. I want something a little more robust than that although with a collection of sharp blades it would do the job just fine. I have a small router plane that I can use to hog out the waste in the ring once the outer lines are established. I embarked on another internet search and found a few more possibilities. The one I'm working on at the moment involves holding the blade in place in a mortise with a wedge and sinking the centre pin into a piece of wood which will fit into an elongated mortise. The plan is to hold the centre pin in place with a bolt, nut and washer. It should work.

This may work

I decided that rather than cut the mortises I would cut the beam in half, cut one side of the mortise into each half and then glue the halves together. The first time I tried it I cut the mortises correctly in one piece and upside down in the opposite piece. I've got them correctly cut in the one I'm working on now. I used the bandsaw to cut the beam and then to rip it in half. The mortises themselves I've marked with a knife and cut with a chisel. It's taken me hours where it would have taken minutes with a router or even with a drill press. I have thoroughly enjoyed marking, chopping and paring while listening to my current who-dun-it. I don't know if this one will ultimately work or not but I know there are a few more hours of enjoyment to be had in trying to get it to work. I also know that as I struggle with the task my skill level increases and, as I said earlier, I don't have to make a living with the work of my hands. If I get really fed up I can use the router or I can give the 'lolly' stick and push-pin contraption another go. If that one breaks it's easy enough to get replacement parts. I'll let you know how the ring for the rosette in Richard's ukulele eventually gets cut. Stay tuned.

Ukulele #1

Ukulele #1

Building a ukulele is a complicated process. Perhaps I should say “complex.” That sounds better but I think 'complicated' is more accurate in my case. Like many projects, on the surface it looks straightforward enough: a sort of figure 8 shaped box with a stick in one end. The trick is that the box has to look good and sound good, according to a standard western musical scale. That's where my old nemesis accuracy comes in. Is it straight? Well, it's sort of straight. Is it square? Sort of. Better get it right in the first place because the error just gets compounded the further into the build you get. Too many times to count Jake tidied up, tweaked or downright fixed what I had done. 

Sanding the sides

I learned a ton. You can translate that as I made a ton of mistakes but, as I always told my students, the only serious mistake is one from which you learn nothing. I can even claim to have made the same mistake several times in a row but eventually I ended up with a list of mistakes I won't make again. The good news is that there are countless mistakes that I haven't made yet so there's still good reason to make a few more instruments. Someone asked me the other day if I still needed help to build an instrument now that I've built one. She seemed surprised when I told her I didn't think I'd be able to build one on my own for quite a long time.

The first one is partly about learning what to pay attention to. The short answer to that is – everything! I did get some photos along the way but not nearly enough. In some ways my inelegant drawings are more helpful than photos. If I draw something I have to process it. If I take a photo sometimes I look at it and wonder why I took it. There's one photo of some masking tape on the inside of the back of the instrument. I remember Jake telling me not to stretch the tape as I put it on and I can't remember why I was putting the tape on in the first place. I think it was to do with lining up the back strip.

Clamping up the fretboard

There are many many small details that get absorbed through practice. Doing something once doesn't count as practice. I'm building two ukuleles instead of one so I can get in a wee bit more practice with each step. I'm hoping that on these two I'll be able to up my game by making smaller and different mistakes. I'm also hoping that by the time these two are finished I'll have fewer absolute blank spots in the process. It's an adventure and I'll be trying out some new things as I go.

The 3:00 a.m. rosette

At the moment I'm at work on two rosettes. The rosette is the decorative circle that goes around the sound hole in the top of a guitar or ukulele. A ukulele doesn't need a rosette and my first uke doesn't have one. Now I'm ready to give it a go. One rosette was partially made for me and one I'm making myself. A couple of days ago I got so involved with what I was doing that I didn't want to stop, and because I'm retired and don't always have to be responsible, I stayed up until 3:00 a.m. so I could see the wooden rosette mostly finished. I'm quite pleased with it so far and absolutely delighted with how much fun I'm having with it. I'm looking forward to a lot more fun on these builds. I know there will be times when I'm ready to take an axe to the whole project and I also know that if I walk away and do something else for a while I'll eventually be ready to get back into the shop and sort it out. Perhaps this time I'll be able to step back enough to invite you along for parts of the journey. Stay tuned.

Jake clamping the bridge on ukulele #1