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.

Kamaka Uke, sanding blocks, and filling in missing wood

So, the last thing I posted before was about sanding blocks. Here we go.

Sanding blocks

 There you go. Get a piece of wood, and glue sandpaper to one side. After it is dry, take it to your belt sander and true up the edges. You now have a sanding block that can get into corners and clean up all kinds of problems. This is what I used to clean up the place where the bridge goes on the Cromwell, and what I started using to set up the Kamaka for wood replacement.

Speaking of the Kamaka, here is my first idea.

The sides are now flat diagonals, and I have put in some koa in the deep part of the slot. 

Not too great. 

Really ugly from the side, there is some significant wood loss here. 

I started trimming a new piece to fit in. This is an early shot, I got it to fit quite well. It's a tough fit, though.

My friend Ray came over, and we started looking at what I had done, and the instrument overall, and decided to get more drastic.

Just chop it all out, the heck with it. Much easier to fit a nice piece in. 

But how will I flatten out the bottom of that space? With another custom sanding block, of course! I made this and sanded it to barely fit in the space. I managed to get down pretty far, then the sandpaper came off, and I had to go pick up the kids, and it was time to quit. I'll get back to it tomorrow, though. 

 That is a lot of wood to remove, but it will be stronger for it. Frankly, there is no good way to fix this disaster, short of making a new neck, which I will end up doing if the thing breaks at some point. For now, this is going to create a workable solution.

I also took a look at the Cromwell with Ray.

This is that hole. 

The patch now fit perfectly. Hooray! I won't glue this up until the back braces are done, though.  

There was a nasty piece of missing wood at the bridge, so we chiseled out a bowl shaped hole. 

A little sanding made it smoother, and more bowl shaped. 

We carved a piece of spruce to roughly fit, then soaked it really well and clamped it on hard. The pressure will help it form to the hole, and then I can glue it on and shave it level. 

We ended up leaving off the wax paper, so that the moisture helps form the top as well. There will be some color and finish work to do, but at least there will be wood there to color and finish! The chip out in that spot was really bad from the previous bridge failure. 

 I'd never heard of doing a spruce repair this way before. I'm excited to see how it turns out.

Worst nut ever, hot glue pot construction, and more

Okay, I'm covering several days of material with this post, so bear with me.

About three weeks ago, I had the time to finally start dissecting that Kamaka Pineapple Uke.

To review, that nut is so ugly that it hurts my feelings.

But the neck underneath is so thin, I need to be very careful about how I remove the darn thing. I opted to saw some slots in it and crush it in place, and hope that the glue isn't so strong that I shatter the neck.

I made a pretty fair size slot, and kept at it until I could crush the thing.

Oh.... words fail me. That appears to be a toothpick used as a shim. This is just horrible.

There is a second set of slots on another side of the "nut". What the heck was this person thinking? The slots may be bass guitar slots. I wonder if an old bass guitar nut was salvaged, and the person who was working on the uke decided to make a bigger slot to accommodate it? That sounds as rational as any other explanation I can come up with.

I mean, what are those slots for?

This is the remaining wood. Wow. Thin.

I took a cut-up credit card and started scraping out some kind of gunk from the fret slots. I don't know what it is. It's nasty though - it might be wax. Wax that is under another layer of finish. I'm thinking that I might just replace these frets, since one is missing, and the other are not well seated. Kamaka tended to finish over their frets, which complicates things somewhat.

I decided to take a shot at stripping the back. The many layers of different finish are rather tough to get off, but I made a good starting effort.

The next day, I went ahead and dealt with some other jobs.

I should get a full shot of this sometime. This is the back of a Favilla baritone uke that I picked up a couple years ago. It was being played by a family of kids who had dropped it until the dovetail fractured. It also suffered from a crack on the back that got bigger as it sat in my garage. The garage is not a good place for instruments.

The front. The neck really got beat up, and was made worse by an inept neck removal by a first-time luthier - me. I really botched this, which is why I left it in my garage for a year, and it got more cracked. Recently I took all the shattered pieces of the dovetail, and glued them back into place on the neck. Now it's time to address that big crack.

The crack won't close, so I wet a sponge and put the whole works in a plastic bag. See ya later!

 Now, I have another project that I haven't mentioned. A 1929 Martin tenor.

Let that sink in.

Okay, for those of you who don't know what you are letting sink in, I'll explain. Martin guitars are good. Old Martin guitars are often really good. Martins from the late 20s through the 30s are often very very good, or at least priced to reflect this. A really, really, really good Martin from the era can be worth six figures.

This is NOT a really really really good Martin. This is a wonderful Martin that got dropped, smashed, partially disassembled, and left in an attic for probably 30 years. It's also not a valuable six-string Martin, it's a four-string tenor, a low-end model made of mahogany. But it still is a neat opportunity for me to work on a golden-era Martin with scalloped braces and bar frets. I get to work on a guitar made during a time when and in a factory where legendary instruments were made. It is a wonderful historical piece.

Better yet, it is so damaged that I can work on it without fear of screwing up a valuable historical instrument. The cost of having an instrument like this restored would be greater than the value of the instrument itself. Even pristine examples are worth less than $2,000.

So, the corner of the top was damaged in a fall. Wood is missing. The only way to deal with this is to replace the missing part. 

That is one nasty area of damage.

So I have made a 45 degree angle block of wood, and I will try to saw through the damage to have a clean joint to work with. Good luck to me.

It seems to have worked.

I made a similar cut in some old mahogany, and didn't get the angle of the grain quite right. The mosquitoes starting coming out to dinner, so I had to quit.

Oh yes, I also made a go-bar deck the other day. I'm really blown away by the clamping pressure this thing can apply. Wow!

And that brings me to today, where I dealt with a completely different instrument! A lovely late 50's Kamaka uke that belongs to a player in Tahoe. The uke suffered from jam-prone tuners and strings that got stuck in narrow nut slots.

Despite a lot of play and fading, this is a wonderful uke. Kamakas from this era are my favorite, hands down - well, as long as one of those hands is holding a Martin uke behind my back. I love them both, but they are very different animals from each other.

Yeah, those friction pegs barely fit in the holes. After 50 years of wear, sawdust and fibers had jammed things up more.

I decided to ream out the holes to clean them out and make things smooth again. I tested a few different drill bits dull end first to see what would fit.

I chucked the bit up in a spare chuck that I keep around.

I then spun the bit through each hole. It cleared out a tiny amount of debris from each one, smoothing things out nicely.

This was wierd - two tuners were of a different alloy than the other two. And this one had serious machining chatter marks on the shaft. That couldn't be good, so I ran it over a file for a couple minutes to knock that mess down. I also cleaned everything with naptha. I didn't want to try to polish the tuners, just get them clean.

One problem with these ukes is the C string. It plays so out of tune that it makes the uke sound like a toy. I thinned down a piece of bone to insert in the bridge, but then thought that it would really look bad.

Yeah, not good. And hard to smooth down too.

A thin piece of koa, though, would be appropriate.

Okay, a quick time out here. I got a wonderful idea for a glue pot from a piano blog a couple years ago. Sadly, that blog is now nowhere to be found, and appears to be offline for good. So I will quickly detail my pot here, and hope that someone, someday, gets the same use out of this information that I got. 

So, here it is. A regular hot water kettle with a temperature control on the side. I measured the temperature, and set it to be 150 degrees.

I put water in the kettle, and then measure my glue into a glass measuring cup in the center.

And a hole in the top lets a brush stick through.

The pot costs less than $20, and works wonderfully. Not only does it make glue, it keeps it moist with the pool of water in the pot, and I can also put a bit of rag in that pool of water so that I have a hot, moist rag to clean up squeeze-out as I work. And I can use that warm water to clean syringes and the measuring cup afterwards. It's a fantastic tool, and much less expensive than a "real" glue pot. 

I had my wood ready, so I just dipped it in the glue.

I also dipped an old sock in the water to wipe up with afterwards.

I pushed the stick in, and just broke it off.

While I was at it, I decided to do the same thing to another uke of the exact same model that I own.

I also tried to glue up a surface crack. I mopped on some glue, and used a suction cup (a Nerf dart in this case) to push it in - a violin-repairman trick. It didn't seem that the crack would close enough for this to matter, so I abandoned the whole idea. This uke lives in a really dry climate, so, unless I am going to take the back off, I won't be able to reinforce anything and keep the cracks from re-appearing.

I shaved off the chunk of koa wood that I had placed. I waited a while for it to dry some more.

With time to kill, I waxed and reinstalled the tuners.

The new strings really didn't want to go into the slots. I used my nut files to widen the slots. I could not believe how deep these were - I was sure that they were too low and I would have to replace the nut. I was wrong. They were just fine. Weird.

This is my string of choice. Seaguar fluorocarbon fishing leader. I have 30, 40, 60 and 80 lb test for uke strings, and it sounds wonderful. I won't say that this is the exact same stuff that you get in a package of fluorocarbon uke strings from certain famous and expensive manufacturers, but if there is a difference, I've yet to notice it. I paid about $100 for 25 yards of all the sizes, and have restrung 12 ukes and three banjos with the stuff. I still have about 15 yards left, so I think I'm doing pretty good.

My last job on the Kamaka was to re-slot the bridge. I didn't want to scar the top, so I laid my palette knife over the area. My nut files made short work of the job, and now the thing plays in tune. It's a wonderful sounding uke, and a real treat to play.

I turned my attention to the Favilla I bagged up a couple weeks ago. The crack not only was tight, the back actually was bowing away from the back braces. I thought that I would use my go-bar deck to clamp it down. I decided against it - there were too many variables, as you shall see.

In fact, the back had completely detached from the back braces. Oh well, one more thing to do.

So, I figured that I would just glue the crack shut, and deal with attaching it to the braces later. I made this fancy deal to create pressure on an inside caul during the clamping.

The brace in action.

The was followed by a frenzy of gluing and clamping.  There was no way for me to take pictures, it was like a speed-ship-in-a-bottle building contest. Working on ukes is fun, but dealing with the insides of the things is a pain in the butt. I ended up with good clamping and good pressure, and felt happy about the whole thing.

There it is, drying.

Later on, I made a half-dozen diamond shaped cleats, and glued them in with yellow glue, holding them in place with magnets. I think this all will hold.