Category: Woodworking
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soundboard and assembly of the ban-tar
Previous posts were about making the fretboard and making the body. Next I worked on the soundboard, which used leftover material from the spruce soundboard I originally bought for my gourd ukulele. The X-brace is made from what I’m pretty sure is mahogany and the sound hole brace, probably unnecessary but gives it a nice […]
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making the ban-tar guitar body
The body of this guitar body is fairly unconventional because I was too lazy to make all the jigs for bending the sides this time around. This effort was pretty focused on just learning about truss rods and fretboards. I started this stage the same way I start a lot of projects these days – […]
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making a guitar fretboard
My first homemade guitar had three main objectives: learn how to make a fretboard, learn how to install a truss rod, finish as soon as possible. So this post is about that first goal. I found a scrap of cocobolo at my local wood store just thick enough to be the fretboard and long enough […]
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homemade plug cutter
I wanted a plug cutter to cut wooden plugs for fret markers for a guitar I am working on. I with an old bolt. To form the ‘flute’ of the cutter where the chips clear out, I made an angled clamp block. I just eyeballed the angle I wanted and drilled a hole in a […]
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bandsaw revival
Revival might be overselling my effort here. Just imagine a lot of wire brushing, steel wool, and shop vacuuming and you will have the right idea. Also, I made blade guards! Both the left and right blade guards were missing. I started by working out the shape for the right blade guard using some junk […]
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travel ukulele upgrade
This is a long overdue (as usual) update to the travel ukulele I made a year and a half ago. I was finding that the mandrel that the strings wrapped around before heading to the tuners was creating way too much friction to actually let the strings tune properly. I was having to turn the […]
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gourd ukulele
If you thought my other ukulele blog post was long, take a deep breath before reading through this one. Also, this one is super delayed. I finished this project early March of 2016… Around Thanksgiving (the one in 2015…) a friend of mine gave me a gourd as a gag gift. Of course, everyone thought I […]
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fixing a DeWalt DW375 planer
I’ve been dying to get a planer for a while now, and recently was lucky enough to acquire this one off Craigslist. It needed a little work to get going though. The main problem was that it was jammed so that turning the hand crank with any reasonable amount of force wouldn’t actually raise or […]
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travel ukulele
This (more) travel-sized ukulele project has been tremendously satisfying! The woodworking part filled me with unbounded joy, and hopefully the music part will be fun, too. The main ‘feature’ of this ukulele is that the tuning pegs (I chose geared ones since they are easier to tune, and I will need all the help I can […]
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Fatigue: a study of flexures in a scooter
Introducing, Fatigue, my preemptively-named flexure-based scooter. You can see how a flexure is perfect for the rear brake, which has quite limited travel. Luckily, it also doesn’t see to many extreme forces. It is made from polycarbonate, about 0.1″ thick. The pivot for the front fork however, needs to achieve relatively high deflection (to improve […]