Small Kamaka and Guild work

Okay, I got a little bit of work done yesterday. Mostly, I cleaned the garage, made a new sanding board, played electric guitar for the first time in ages, and did a little work on the Kamaka and the Guild. 

I started carving away the new piece to make it look right. The big problem was that the grain was slightly diagonal, so I had to carve in the direction from the nut to the body on one side, and from the body to the nut on the other side, otherwise I would take out a huge chunk of wood following the grain, and that would probably be bad. I used a knife for most of the carving. 

Carve, sand and carve some more, then level the thing with the current fretboard. 

From the back, all looks well. This uke, like most Kamaka ukes of this period, is remarkably asymmetrical, I assume the neck was quickly formed on a belt sander. 

From the front, pretty good, although the grain is not as good a match as I might have hoped. That's enough for now - this is about 40 minutes of work to get to this point. 

I pulled the Guild D35 out, and decided to get the neck to actually sit in the pocket. I sanded, chiseled, and worked for about 45 minutes, and got it pretty close. 

Sanding revealed some significant cracks in the neck block that I could not see before. 

Pretty bad stuff. I wicked in some thin CA glue and clamped it good and tight. 

A block inside, and one outside, and LOTS of pressure. I want that crack closed, otherwise there could be some nasty trouble in the future. The neck could move around, and that would defeat all this work. 

This morning, I took of the clamp, and put the neck in the pocket. It's pretty sloppy right now. 

The glued up area. 

It's really hard to get a picture of this, but I want the top of the fingerboard to be in a plane that intersects the top of the bridge. I'm a little low now, it was better yesterday before I fixed the block. That tells me that I am on the right track, though, because if I hadn't fixed the block, I would have falsely assumed that everything was fine. 

Oh man, this is going to look so nice when it is done. That fretboard is a little gaudy, but what the heck - this poor guitar deserves it after all it has been through!

Not much work will happen for the next few days - I'll be very busy with family coming over, and shuttling the kids around from event to event.

More Kamaka

Okay, not a whole lot got done today, but what got done was good.

I sanded some more. 

And more.

And more! I'm not going to be able to eliminate that gouge on the side, that would simply be too risky. 

This was an amazingly thin neck to start with, and now I'm on the cusp of breaking the thing altogether. 

I made a piece to fit, but it ended up too thin. Time to make a second one. 

I needed the ends to be perfectly square to the bottom, so I got out a level and used it as a kind of shooting board, holding the piece against it while sanding on my sanding board. 

I had to round the edges slightly, as there was no way I could get the inside corners of the cutout area perfectly square. And after all this, we decided that the piece was a terrible mismatch in looks, so I made a third. 

I had other Kamaka ukes out for comparison. I'm getting to know a lot more about the Gold label era Kamakas. 

After making the third piece, it was time for some glue and an overnight stint in a clamp. 

Looking at this Kamaka and the others, I'm guessing that it is a late 50's, early 60s uke. It has a "W" written on the neck block, exactly the same as the "W" written on the neck block of another uke I have that is known to have been made in 1961, so that would be a good guess for the year. These don't have serial numbers, so that is about as close as I'm going to get for a guess.