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I trimmed the sides to fit, cutting them a little over-size at first and then trimming from whichever end seemed best until they fit: Now the sides need to be attached at the tail using a block of something appropriate - I have some mahogany here. If you want a perfect seam, this is the...

No, no, nooo! Once I glue the back on it locks the geometry in place. The back is glued to the heel, so the neck can't rotate forwards. Cunning, huh!

No, I let the glue dry first. Getting the neck and soundboard aligned properly is crucial to it playing right, so I wouldn't risk the joint moving. Notionally this means that the neck join is raised 0.75mm from my building board, but the top is bendy so it's nearer 0.25 mm. That's small enough...

The scary part! Not because bending sides is inherently difficult though. The scariness is because you never know how that piece of wood is going to behave until you try to bend it - some cooperates nicely, others might crease, fold or even break. And I've never bent Tasmanian Blackwood before...

Assembly begins! Brace and bridge plate being glued on: Most sopranos have two braces, one above and one below the sound hole, to stop the uke gradually folding up into its own sound hole. But the narrow waist on this shape, copied from a Dias uke of the 1890s, makes the upper bout stiff...

Now it's nearly time to start sticking stuff together, rather than making it smaller. But first I need to get the soundboard down to its final thickness. I'm finding my wooden smoother plane is working very well on this wood - note the wispy shavings which fill it - and the cabinet scraper deals...

I think (I'm not a very systematic builder) that the last step before starting to put things together is to sort out the fretboard. If you were attaching the neck separately, as a bolt-on, dovetail, etc, you could leave the fretboard until later. But with Spanish Heel construction the neck gets...

I had to look up colloidal silica, which seems to work in part by reacting with the thing being polished to form a compound which is easily rubbed off. But that's removing material, as is the glass example, though not by abrasion as you say. I couldn't think of any way to polish without...

Hmm. If it's not removing metal then it's doing something very clever indeed, probably at the atomic or subatomic level by rearranging the atoms of the blade without removing them. I think a Physics Nobel prize is in the works!

No truss rod required for nylon strings - even classical guitars don't have 'em. The non-toothed iron in the woodie was a sudden brainwave, inspired by my Stanley no 80 scraper plane which I don't use any more. The problem with the Stanley is the handles - on these tiny plates they foul the...

Hard to say - I do 15-60 mins at time when I have free moments. I'd guess we're about 6 hours in so far, but if I used a drum sander and spindle sander I could be this far in about 2 hours, much of which is measuring (so with good templates, maybe 1.5 hours). I usually estimate 40-50 hours...

My next process is to shape the heel. With my new rasps this is vastly easier! I use the round side of the rasp to establish a curve on the imaginary line from where the neck joins the top (the edge of my slot for the sides) round that heel and joining up at the equivalent place on the opposite...

Up to now I haven't really flattened the top surface of the neck, just got it close. The reason for this is that as I carve the neck there will be some internal stresses in the wood which are likely to make it move about a little. Any flat surface I make won't be flat enough any more. But now...

To rough carve the neck I start by dividing the back into thirds, and marking a line on the side 1/3 up from the surface of the neck: Then I got out my new rasps - less than £15 for all three direct from China, and they're really sharp. [Checked up pricing recently and they're over £20 a set...

Next I need a neck. The neck blank in the kit is very nice, but it's not cut for using a Spanish Heel, and that's what I want to do (explained later). So I'll use that for some other project and substitute a similar neck from my own stock. I glued up two pieces of mahogany (recycled shelf) to...

I started this a couple of weeks ago, so there is more to come before I revert to real-time building. Next was thicknessing the sides but they are trickier. With top and back I could plane one half, clamping at the other, and then flip the plate and plane the other half. This works because they...

Many are dead flat, but I like an aggressive belly - in due course!

But I have a better device: I took a punt on a £15 box of wooden planes because I saw this in it and got lucky. It has a toothed blade: (this is a veneering blade with lots of grooves, for large work fewer but deeper grooves makes it work faster) In effect, I'm scraping twenty tiny...

But the plate is hardly any thinner after this work. I need to start work on the other side, but planing off thin shavings will take forever. And trying to take thick shavings will cause tearout. Dilemma! The solution is to set my cap iron for thicker shavings, and then plane at 45 degrees to...

Thicknessing plates is always the hardest part of the job, and is really daunting for first time builders. Glueing together was comparatively easy! So I thought I'd explain how I do it, in case it helps others. The problem is that this Blackwood is about 4mm thick (which is a good thing...