Impermanence

Yesterday was a day of mixed emotions. I found out about the death of someone I have known for over 40 years. She has been ill for a long time and her husband has cared for her unflinchingly. They both approached the end of her life with grace. Although life is finite, seeing a marriage of many happy decades broken by death is always sad.

Practice grooves and tools on my chaotic bench

I did what I often do when I’m in a pensive mood: I went into the shop. I have work to do on the ukulele this week but I didn’t do that. Instead I pursued my latest crazy idea. I want to build a ukulele using mostly hand tools. If you’re tired of me banging on, as the Brits say, about hand tools, you can stop reading and I won’t be offended. There are a whole bunch of reasons why I’m drawn increasingly to hand tool woodwork. It’s quiet. It’s simple. It’s meditative. It requires a specific set of skills and, in a strange way, it connects me to those woodworkers who have gone before me. I love to pick up a saw and know that my father-in-law used it, or that a delicate little spokeshave once rested in my grandfather’s hands. I have the ruler that my dad often used. I have tools from my uncles as well.

I’ve always been a slow worker. I was the kid in school who was never finished when the teacher told us to move onto something else. When a recipe says it will take half an hour to make it usually takes me an hour. What I like most about retirement is that I seldom have to rush anymore and most of the deadlines are of my own making.

In the shop yesterday I worked on figuring out how to get a flat bottom on a groove that doesn’t go all the way along a piece of wood. I need to do this to hold the ukulele’s saddle. The saddle is the piece of bone that sits in the bridge and helps transfer sound from the strings to the body of the instrument.

The white bit is the saddle

If the groove isn't flat on the bottom the saddle doesn’t touch the wood uniformly and sound won’t transfer well. It’s easy to set up a router table or a drill press to cut the groove to the proper depth and you can be done with it in a matter of seconds. However, routers make me nervous. The spinny bits go really fast and they are really sharp. I prefer to take my time with a ⅛ inch chisel and a wooden mallet. 

I did 6 practice grooves yesterday. By the time I cut the last one I was grinning like an idiot because I was having fun and getting better results each time. To get the bottom flat I tried a couple of different tools before I settled on a beading tool. I haven’t used it much and it is perfect for cleaning up the bottom of the grooves. I can set the depth, remove most of the waste with a chisel, and then clean up the bottom with the beading tool. If my stock is flat to start with, then the bottom of the groove ends up flat so the saddle makes contact all the way along. I’m pretty confident now that I can make the bridge for the current build using hand tools. It won’t be better than if I used machines but I will enjoy the process much more and the sense of satisfaction I get at the end will be greater.

There are still a number of things that I haven’t figured out how to do with hand tools and I’ll work on those one at a time. Sometimes I wish I had come upon woodworking earlier in my life, but now I have time and I don’t have to worry about making an income from woodworking. If you need to make a living from your craft, machines make sense. Once you set up a machine properly the results will be the same each time and the work goes much more quickly. Why not give repetitive jobs to a machine? No reason unless hand tools are more fun and less stressful. I know how fortunate I am to be able to make that choice. And, if I never manage an entire instrument with hand tools, that’s okay too. As long as it’s mostly fun and my skills keep improving I'll be happy.

Beading tool with 1/8" cutter