The best way to mount 8″ trailer tyres is to take them to a tyre fitter. This method is how I did it and I’m noting it for future reference. However a lot of swearing is involved.
First look at the wheels and tyres. The ones I did years ago went on fairly easily. These laughed at me – no way were they going on.
Starting to feel like it might be finished one day!
The neck is more-or-less finished. I’ve fitted the tuners (drilled out to take the larger strings) so that I could see what it all sounded like. The answer is that it sounds lovely 🙂
Continue readingI’ve cut some more bits of wood. There is:
Just because I don’t have enough projects on the go 😉 I’ve started making a bass ukulele. I call it a μ-bass.
The body is an old Port Wine box. Since this wasn’t glued I’ve run Titebond around all the joints so they don’t buzz. The neck is a old piece of mahogany that has been lying around for 20 years. I bought some bass guitar tuners on eBay – I’ll need to make the slots bigger. Soundboard will be birch plywood.
See this summary of the build.
I made a towing cover:
The idea is to reduce the towing drag, make the boat a bit more secure in transport and provide a cover when away from home. It is made from uncoated acrylic canvas. The colour was chosen on the basis that (a) it is cheerful and (b) it was half-price.
The towing drag is important as we are planning to get an electric car and towing can reduce the range by 50%. Custard has always felt particularly draggy on the trailer so hopefully this cover will reduce the drag somewhat.
Continue readingMaking progress. I cut down the GRP a lot more, then removed the old tabbing holding the central ply in place.
The plywood doesn’t look too bad. There is definitely damage in the frontmost section but this isn’t structural.
Continue readingThe Wanderer dinghy – mine at least – has marine plywood cunningly concealed at the lowest point of the boat. The plywood runs from the front buoyancy tank, under the mast step, and to the centreboard case. Sitting at the lowest point of the boat, the wood is often sitting in water. My boat is now 40 years old and poking around in the front buoyancy the wood appeared a bit softer than I’d like. Well – the wood at the top could be pulled apart with my fingers.
In addition, my boat has a free-standing mast without shrouds. This is both a good and bad thing. The shrouds help to keep the mast upright, but they mostly try to pull the mast through the bottom of the boat. The wood is obviously designed to resist this downwards pull. However, the free-standing mast has huge sideways forces at the foot and if that foot isn’t really attached to anything strong then this would be a disaster – both for the boat and anyone sitting near the mast.
Continue reading
Finally made some progress on the telescope again. It has been about 2 1/2 years…
Continue readingI bought a cheap Makala pineapple ukulele secondhand on eBay – I couldn’t justify anything expensive. Overall I’m very happy with it – the tone is fine & it holds its tune. However the intonation (tuning) of the fretted notes was poorer than I’d like particularly on the C (lowest and thickest) string.
There are a number of reasons why this can happen:
Adjustable compensated saddles are a standard feature of electric guitars and basses providing screw adjustment of the length of the string. However for some reason they are not standard on acoustic instruments – maybe just because of the weight. Expensive ukuleles have fixed compensated saddles but cheaper ones (and mine is very cheap) don’t.
I checked the action (distance from string to fret) at the first fret and the 12th fret and these appeared to be ok – well within the figures given on the websites I found.
So what I needed to do was move the saddle away from the fretboard for the thickest (C) string. This involved cutting back the saddle until the intonation was correct at the 12th fret. Even on a cheap instrument this is a bit daunting.
To make the process reversible I bought a new saddle. I rubbed it on fine sandpaper until it was the right size to fit into the slot. The old saddle could be slid out once the strings were slackened.
I’ve recently started playing the ukulele and am loving it. I bought myself a cheap pineapple Makala soprano uke on eBay – it isn’t the finest uke in the world but it does the job and I like the shape. One issue I quickly hit was where to store it – the cardboard box it came in doesn’t really do the job.
No-one sells non-bag cases for pineapple ukes. So I took a punt on a Stagg semi-rigid case on eBay. It didn’t fit but wasn’t too far off, so this post is about how I got it to fit.
