MIMF

I'll add my voice to Bill's. Don't use glue and sawdust to fill those cracks. Glue and sawdust looks very much darker than the original wood, and also you'd have to sand it down level which would remove the decoration. I've used glue and sawdust on mahogany necks to fill dings, and even there under ...

If you can live with visible cracks on the soundboard then you can still cleat them. Take a guitar top E string (or nylon fishing line), drill a tiny hole in the cleat, hot hide glue on the cleat, then use the wire to slide the cleat along the crack and pull into position. With HHG just pulling gent...

I've recycled furniture for ukuleles, and am currently making a pair of guitars using largely wood from a mahogany wardrobe door. The biggest problem is finding vertical grain wood. Most furniture is made from flat-sawn pieces (if it's solid wood at all). This can still work, but you have to design ...

I use a heat gun with a 3 inch/75mm steel pipe and it gets hot enough, but I still have to rock the wood on the pipe to heat a wide enough portion to bend. If I don't rock it, I scorch a narrow strip and also produce a sharp kink rather than a nice bend. A damp rag on the pipe and aluminium strip on...

Tuning is GDAE. I'd separate the string courses by around 1.5mm, and space the courses to fit the neck width. It's high tension and players don't usually bend notes, so you can go closer to the edge than on a guitar. Low action if a bluegrass mandolin (2mm at the 12th or less), probably 2.5mm if a b...

Parlor guitars at 24.5 inch/622mm work fine, and I'd guess 600mm with heavy strings could work too. The two limiting factors are bass response and usable string diameters. You can put a big box on a small neck to achieve bass, though it looks odd, but at some point the low E string for standard tuni...

Heat does soften dried CA, which is only acrylic plastic after all. You can heat and clamp to see if that will close the gap up enough, though of course your softened acrylic in the joint is pretty stiff so it might not squeeze out sufficiently. Heat and a thin blade would remove the binding but lea...

Salt is used to slow down the gelling time, so I suppose that might make the glue runnier.

You could always buy a bottle of spring water (not mineral water) from the supermarket and use that to see if it makes a difference.

Greg Steil wrote:I'm gonna go for as light as I can build it.

Conventional wisdom says the opposite - you don't want the cone to flex while you're playing or it will distort.

This was my skeleton (pear-shaped body), ready for cladding.

Plywood is a common choice. The important thing is to get the sound well and body really solid (and of course, different designs depending on what type of cone you are using).

I've only built one, and it sounds pretty good but weighs enough that I need a strap to play it standing.

I recycled the body of a 70s Japanese dreadnaught into a pear-shaped tenor guitar with a new top made of yew. That turned out fine.

Bill Sylvester wrote:Don't know if waxed/ dewaxed, timeframe is one day

I'd baby it for a week, when it should be tough enough to cope with handling. Probably a month until it's "fully" cured. But it gets tougher thereafter, albeit slowly. After 50 years it should even be insoluble in alcohol.

I suspect your only course is to find a piece of stainless steel about the size of one tooth and twang it, to hear how it sounds. If it's not musical, would bronze be worth a try? Statues survive outside, though I'm sure they're not the same bronze as sheet material. Hope you find something, as an o...

No neck angle for most of my builds. 2mm above the fret crown is rather low for nylon strings, as if you dig in at all you'll get buzz/rattle of strings on frets. For a beginner I'd give them 3mm, droppable to 2.5mm once they become a little more delicate in their playing. This gives you fretboard h...

The wave in the grain is clearly where it wants to move, so if you can flatten it then I'd join the opposite edges. The unstable part would then be glued to the rims, which should resist movement once it's thicknessed. Also, the wave looks very like the waist of a guitar, so you could design the bod...

Have you checked the top of the saddle? If it has a flat spot or dent, that might be the cause.

I'd use a light coloured dry cloth I think. Light coloured so that it will show scorch marks before the fingerboard does.

Too many questions! You need to do a lot more research, so that you have at least a basic understanding of what you are trying to build. Your questions suggest you haven't got there yet. This means that answers won't be understandable to you, or might even mislead you. Two things to get you started:...

My numbers are like Ron's. I use flat fretboards. The string spacing on a uke is usually 8.5-9 mm, the same as a classical guitar. You can build a neck as wide as you like, but most players find this spacing comfortable. The string spacing doesn't have to match the neck width, so you could build a w...

I've made ukes with all these (except dowels). Spanish heel is probably my favourite because, for me, I get the neatest neck to body join and can build freehand rather than using a mould. A flat top is easiest, though a slight dome is also common. I think an aggressively curved back gives better vol...