OOk-Ah-Lay-Lay Action — tyson hand-did

OOk a Lay Lay Action | Just a few update pics on Sara's uke. Got the neck carved and attached and decided to do a couple of NEW things I did not do on my own guitar - custom fret marker inlays AND cutting the fret slots.

If you mess up the fret slots on a stringed instrument, you have really messed up. When I built the guitar, I bought a pre-slotted and radiused fingerboard because that process scared me to death. Once I thought about the whole process, however, it is not as difficult or terrifying as I thought so I decided to give it a shot on this build.

Here is the secret to precision on this: knowing my scale length and having a spreadsheet that calculates all the fret positions down to the 1000th of a MM, I just took those measurements, and created a fret slot template in Adobe Illustrator. Printed that puppy up and taped it to the fingerboard and cut away. I am hoping I did a good job here - we won't know until we string the Uke up!

I also did a custom set of fret markers for this one. Instead of the traditional dots, I cut some rectangles out of the Maple I used in the neck and then carefully routed out the slots on the upper side of the finger board.

I have seen this somewhere on a guitar in the past and love the concept. The markers are visible from the front and top of the fretboard. A nice custom touch I think.

We had a very cool piece of cutoff for the headstock that has a great stripe right down the middle.

The little Uke is coming together nicely and I hope to be finished in the next week.