Starting off, I fitted the back piece onto the rest of the body and, hurray, it was a good fit!
While we waited for the newly boxed uke to set up, Mike showed us how to cut the fingerboards using his fingerboard template and then went on to explain the mathematical formula that was applied to arrive at the fret spacing.
When the fresh boxed uke was freed from its clamps this is how she looked:
Not bad, eh? Well take a closer look at the overlap on the edges which I then had to rasp down:
Next to the router to fine tune those edges some more:
And now what? Sanding and more sanding...
Took a break to cut out the sound hole:
And then we actually took the time to go out for lunch at an awesome ol'skool Hawaiian place on none other than the nearby Sand Island.
Back at the wood shop we could, for the first time, determine the initial pitch of the instruments by tapping on the soundboard and having the tuner pick up the tone resonating through the sound hole. Mine came in at 15 cents sharp of G. Mike marked this in the headstock and said we'd be able to see how much lower the pitch goes after we sand the sound board. Cool, eh? Pitch should get lower as the soundboard gets tapered thinner towards the edges.
So we packed up our new ukes into their cases and laden with sandpaper we prepared to head back to our hotels for a weekend of 100 grit first stage sanding.
The end of one very intense but productive week. I worked so hard today that I managed to pop a button right off my aloha shirt and needed to improvise a temporary repair. Well, like Mike says, "every mishap is a new opportunity to be creative!
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