I’d been hoping that I could get my Sharkfin Ukulele finished before Christmas, but it ain’t gonna happen! Construction has officially stopped. I’ve tidied up my tools and packed them away. I’ve also tried to vac up all the sawdust… hope Mrs Uke doesn’t look too closely at the carpet… :-s

Everybody out of the water!!!

I’ve spent a lot of time sanding to the point that I’m getting a bit sick of the sight of sand paper. Eventually, yesterday, I felt the burning desire to glue the bridge in place. I toyed with the idea of putting in dowling to be extra sure, but figured that wood glue would be enough. Here you can see that I’ve clamped it and left it to set over night.

Remember that I’d talked about challenges that I’d been facing with my choice of tuning peg? I’d wanted planetary pegs but they were too expensive. So I’d bought some Grover pegs only to discover that they were too big. I ended up with the cheapest set I had to hand which were some small pegs I’d had shipped over from China. The problem I found with these was that the heads were burring. The solution was to take the shafts from a bigger tuning peg and fit them with the heads from the cheapo Chinese set. I needed to enlarge the opening for the shaft on the heads and rework the body holes to fit the thicker shafts. The end result is a set of heads that are a lot firmer. You can see the end result in this picture.

This morning I fitted the end pins and wiped the body down with white spirit. The wood on the fretboard and bridge came up really nice. Unfortunately, the body still has all sorts of little scuffs and scratches which I’m going to have to work out before I’m happy

Here’s how the Sharfin looked just before I packed it away. See the dark mark inside the centre hole? That’s a hole I had to work into the wood to allow me to get the longer tuning peg shafts into place. You can only see it from certain angles. I’ve decided that I’m just going to tidy it up and leave it at that.

Here’s something that will make you laugh. I was looking for some string or rope to use as a strap for the Sharkfin and I couldn’t find anything that looked right… That was until I stumbled across the above sex bondage rope from Japan! I’ve only gone and bought some! Ha ha! Of course, as well as hopefully being a top ukulele strap, it has the added bonus that I can have Japanese bondage sex with it too! It’s a win-win! Well, that is until Mrs Uke spots the receipt :-S Oh… I do hope that I haven’t done something here that I’ll regret 😀

One last picture for you. In the spirit of lining up future projects for myself when I haven’t even finished the current one… Look at this cigar box I just bought! Isn’t it handsome! Look at that logo! Does it remind you of the artwork that accompanied my post of Into Your Arms? I have a sneaking suspicion that it may be too small to make a cigar box uke out of, but I liked it too much to let it slip through my fingers! What with the cigars and bondage rope, I think this Christmas could be an interesting one in the King Uke household. Ha ha. This might be my last post! 🙂