The Curious Kid
Active member
This may be useful for my fellow poor student luthiers that, like me, cannot afford to purchase the proper amount of clamps for gluing the sound board or back on their uke.
I glued the back on my near-finished uke today with a bunch of mismatched clamps I found lying around in the basement... when I used them up, I still had gaps. So I had to quickly improvise, and what I ended up with is what I plan to use in the future. It's a crude method, but it is also cheap, simple, lightweight, and effective.
I dug through the garbage bin to find suitable scraps, (3/4 ply would be more effective than scraps, however.) drilled holes in them spaced apart slightly more than the width of my uke. then I cut some short pieces off a dowel, put those short pieces in the holes drilled in the scrap piece and took that assembly over to my uke before the glue had even begun drying. I fit my assembly over the uke's side and then put some of the thin wood shims I had lying all over in the gap between the dowel and the back of the uke until the back was flush with the side.
The nicest thing about such cheap apparatus, though, is that they are not heavy or bulky like normal clamps. So when using them, one doesn't have to worry about marking their surface or accidentally over-tightening and cracking something, which I also did today.
I can post a picture if anyone is interested in seeing one, but they're pretty simple.
I glued the back on my near-finished uke today with a bunch of mismatched clamps I found lying around in the basement... when I used them up, I still had gaps. So I had to quickly improvise, and what I ended up with is what I plan to use in the future. It's a crude method, but it is also cheap, simple, lightweight, and effective.
I dug through the garbage bin to find suitable scraps, (3/4 ply would be more effective than scraps, however.) drilled holes in them spaced apart slightly more than the width of my uke. then I cut some short pieces off a dowel, put those short pieces in the holes drilled in the scrap piece and took that assembly over to my uke before the glue had even begun drying. I fit my assembly over the uke's side and then put some of the thin wood shims I had lying all over in the gap between the dowel and the back of the uke until the back was flush with the side.
The nicest thing about such cheap apparatus, though, is that they are not heavy or bulky like normal clamps. So when using them, one doesn't have to worry about marking their surface or accidentally over-tightening and cracking something, which I also did today.
I can post a picture if anyone is interested in seeing one, but they're pretty simple.