Complete Nunes, lots of mistakes...

This has been a fairly discouraging series of repairs.

First, about two weeks ago, I finally attached the bridge to the Nunes ukulele.

I needed some kind of caul to back up the bridge on the Nunes. I used a forstner bit to make holes in the ends of a piece of scrap wood.

I then hot-glued some magnets in the holes.

I used the magnets to position and hold the caul, and put on a strip of wood to help with placing the bridge.

A little hide glue, and I was set to go!!

The finches were not particularly impressed. And they were right. 

The next day, I went to string up the Nunes uke, and heard a sickening "crack!" I took the strings off, and the bridge popped right off.

My guess is that the wood was too dirty on the face of the uke, and the hide glue simply had no adhesion. I decided to switch to yellow glue, since there was no chance of the hide glue holding.

Well, shucks. There was almost no adhesion at all.

I scrubbed the area with bottled water and some naptha as well.

I also re-drilled the holes for the magnets in the caul, making them really close to the surface of the other side. I added a couple layers of felt to the other side as well.

A day later, I was ready to re-glue again.

It looked good!

And, here it is a few days later. Success!

Not bad at all.

A pretty decent looking side.

The replaced binding is noticeable if you know to look for it.

I then turned my attention to a Martin tenor that I've been working on for about a year. A couple of braces are really loose. I was about to glue them, then realized that I needed a go-bar setup to really do this right. I was not going to make one today, so I set this aside. In retrospect, that was a REALLY good decision.

I failed to get pictures of gluing up cracks on the cuatro. It's a slow process. The wood is so ultra-thin that it is really hard to get enough pressure in to keep it together. 

New project! A 70's Harmony 165, and all mahogany ladder braced guitar. This side had a small crack.

This side is a bit worse.

Actually, it is REALLY BAD. A crack all the way from top to bottom, with a bunch of fracturing on the ends and a bad back fracture. This was sitting on a refrigerator and took a spill.

To put it mildly, I made a complete hash of the job, botching the gluing and just fouling up things in general. I was too enthusiastic, and ended up getting into trouble. I should know better by now.

Really, this Harmony is a huge job, and I need to take the back off to really repair/replace the side. I'll have to think about how I want to approach this.

A really discouraging end to the day.