I thought this was a good idea, but it turned out less than great.
Category Archives: In Progress
Finishing, unfinished
Not much visible progress. Doing the French polish thing.
It looks a lot better in photos than in person. It’s only shiny if you get the light hitting it just right.
Baby Steps
Not a lot of progress, what with holidays, vacation, and other projects. Although many are restricted to their homes and not working, I’m still putting in 40 hours a week. It’s just from my dining table instead of an office.
As noted last time, I forgot to leave a way to get the ground wire from the bridge to the control cavity. So here’s that done:
Strings
Strung up in the white. This way I can get a rough setup and look for major problems.
What lousy photo composition. It’s not something I’m good at. Should have taken it outside, but I want the wood to acclimate to indoor temperature and humidity. (The neck made a nice hygrometer in the garage.)
GSO
I’ve attached the neck, so I guess it’s officially a guitar-shaped object now.
Bass Frets
Had some time over the weekend to make some more progress. The combination of fretwire that matches the slot width, combined with a proper fretting hammer (seen in the first photo) made this probably the easiest fret installation I’ve done so far.
Hole-y Headstock
I drilled tuner holes. But first I had to order a 14mm brad-point bit. (Well, it didn’t have to be brad-point, but they work a lot better for this application.)
Hmm, this might not be a genuine made-in-Austria Fisch. New bit on the left, an older one on the right.
Headstock
Finally got around to gluing the plate on the headstock. To be trimmed later. Pretty sure it’s padouk. I know it’s left over from a previous uke build.
Thought I’d done this
While it’s definitely easier and faster to post photos to Instagram, for some reason it doesn’t automatically generate a complete blog post here simultaneously. Possibly because WordPress is a completely separate entity. So you’ll have to pay attention to two different locations to get a more complete picture of what’s going on. I’m sure you can handle it.
Enough of that. You’ll have seen this first photo already, I suspect.
Update time, I guess
Not as much progress over the holidays as I’d like, but that’s what happens around this time of year. All the help migrates south for the winter.
At least the first two photos have already been posted to Instagram and Facebook, so unless you’re interested in reading about the details, you can skip this post. Both of you.

Fancy-schmancy flush-fit control cavity cover.
This bit didn’t come out quite as nicely as I’d have liked. Continue reading