Making a Ukulele – Part 3

Well, it took us a while, but we’ve finally gotten back to working on our ukulele kit. As you may recall, the next step was to sand the neck even with the fingerboard, and to mark off the bridge placement.

Sanding the neck was the easy part. The only issue was that after sanding the neck even it left flat spots on the sides of the neck. No big deal, we just had to round off the flat spots with sandpaper, although this did take us awhile.

Marking off the bridge placement was more difficult. Following the instructions in the kit, and taking the advice of the forum folks at ezfolk.com, we measured and marked where the bridge will be glued to the body. According to what we read on the forum, the directions with the kit are incorrect. You can go here to get the correct measurements, at least we hope they’re correct!

Next, we taped thread into the 1st and 4th string positions on the bridge and the nut, and lined the threads evenly across the sound hole. A word of caution on this step, don’t drink “special wine” before trying to line up the threads.

The final step was marking around the bridge with a pencil, and then covering that area with a piece of tape. This was done so that Grandma wouldn’t accidentally paint where we need to glue the bridge to the ukulele body.

We took it over to Grandma’s on Sunday, and she said she’d have it back to us in a couple of weeks!