Ukulele #3 update

  

'Lilred' the current uke under construction

     A photo turned up in my ‘memories’ on my phone the other day. It was a year ago and the photo was of Richard’s ukulele. I'm about at the same point on my current build, maybe a bit farther along. Time for the bridge. On the other two ukuleles Jake has made the bridges for me. A bridge comes out of a small piece of wood and the idea of getting a piece that size near a router bit or even a drill press makes me quite nervous.
    It’s not that I’m against power tools or woodworking machines but I am very nervous around them. They get things done much much faster than I can with hand tools but things can also go wrong much much faster. I always feel I lack control around them, even the ones I use fairly often like the band saw and the spindle sander. But it’s not even that that makes me hesitant to flip the switch on the machines. It’s the maintenance.
    I may be sounding like a broken record here. If my car doesn’t work I can take it to a mechanic. If my bandsaw isn’t in top condition, which at the moment neither of the two I own is, it’s up to me or me and Richard-the-Long-Suffering to figure out what the problem is and to fix it. I find the prospect overwhelming and tend to throw up my hands and walk away allowing the machine to collect dust, or I keep using it in less than optimal condition until it completely balks. Richard is good at troubleshooting. Even if he doesn’t use the machines, he can see how they are put together and figure out how they ought to operate. Working on shop machinery is not his idea of a good time so I hesitate to ask him for help.
    But back to the bridge. I’ve been thinking hard about whether I could learn now to make a bridge using only hand tools, not because I’m a purist but because I’m a chicken. I could learn to use the router table using guide blocks so that the operation would be as safe as possible but I wouldn’t enjoy it. I’m in the truly wonderful position of not having to do any kind of woodwork in order to put food on the table so enjoying the process is my first priority.
    I’ve been experimenting with various tools for the past month or so and, over the course of nine practice bridges, I developed a method of working that left me confident enough to actually cut into the piece of wood designated as the bridge for the current ukulele. As I was cleaning up the walls of the small mortise that holds the piece of bone I pressed a bit too hard and split the whole block of wood lengthwise. I got out the glue. (No I'm not going to point out the split in the photo.)
    I’ve seen tests on YouTube and read articles that say that modern wood glues, when properly applied and cured, are stronger than the wood they bond and certainly when joints I’ve made have broken it’s the surrounding wood that has failed and not the glue joint.
    I glued and clamped, applying sawdust to the wet glue as a filler and to hide the join. I did this several times and then picked up the work where I left off. In an ideal world the bridge of the uke needs to be of one piece of wood because it takes the most strain and is essential to the proper intonation of the instrument. Since I didn’t have another piece of rosewood and I wanted the bridge done, I took a chance.
    When Jake checked it, he thought I would need to build another one because the repair wouldn’t be strong enough. He asked my permission to try to break it. Might as well find out now rather than get it on the instrument and have it fail at that point. He wasn’t able to break it so we decided it was probably strong enough to withstand the stresses of the strings as the instrument is played. I still have some work left to do on it before it will be ready to install and I’ll see how it holds up as I work it. Jake has some more rosewood that I can use if I need to, or choose to, make another bridge. Regardless of whether I make another bridge for this instrument or not, I intend to keep building instruments and I will be quite content to build my bridges using hand tools.
    Jake can build a bridge in about half an hour. It takes me probably three to five hours to build one but I listen to my audio books, take my time and am perfectly content. Because the band saw is not cutting accurately enough when I’m ripping stock, I’ve even taken to ripping the blanks for the bridges with a hand saw. It’s a challenge and the more I do it, the more accurate I’ll get. I understand hand tools. The tool has a sharp edge that you push or pull through the wood. Period. If I keep my tools sharp and keep working to develop my skills I will have a system that I can manage comfortably.
    I’m not ruling out a time when I’ll choose to have the machines do the work, and I’m not going to sell off the ones I have in the shop. For now I’m content to poke away at my woodworking tasks sharpening as I go. As I putter, I tip my hat to my grandfather and great uncle who were trained on hand tools even as they embraced the speed and accuracy of machines.

Richard's ukulele under construction a year ago