I had a pleasant visit yesterday from John Moffat and his son Danny. They brought along the banjo ukulele inherited from John's father. Danny is a guitar player and you can bet he is now going to be a banjo uke guy as this old gem just came into their hands. It is a Mele banjo uke that John thinks his father would have bought in Hawaii in the 1930's. I tightened up the tuners a bit, gave Danny a little advice and he has a player.
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Another event of yesterday was the arrival of a set of new strings from Southcoast in an effort to get my baritone playing in C tuning. Before installing them I wanted to convert this uke to using Bridge Pins. A simple project of enlarging the existing string holes to accept the 3% auger that shapes the holes to accept the tapered pins. That done, I installed the new strings, Double Re-entrants. The jury is still out on them. Each instrument has a tuning and strings that are best for it. Not sure that these are the strings but I will play them for a few days and see.
I had another full day in the shop today! A luxury indeed. I began roughing out the neck shapes on the four tenor necks I will be using.
Here they are all lined up with their future parts. I also spent a good deal of time running the backs and sides pictured, through the thickness sander. Now they are all nice and smooth and close to their final thickness. I had 120 grit paper on the sander to make fast progress, Soon I will change to 180 grit to sand them down to their final thickness. That will mean less hand sanding at the finishing time.
Next was joining the newly sanded backs. This is done just as the tops were, with the simple clamping device shown in a previous posting.
A little over an hour later the glue has set and the back is together
These two pieces were just barely wide enough- but they will be fine.
