Igor – go get me some brains. We have four bodies (all bound up) and four rough necks with rough ‘heads’ but we have no brains!
But seriously folks, all four bodies are bound, though not finish sanded. Dogwood soprano, spalted sycamore and apple concerts, and a sycamore baritone. The necks are being worked on as glue dries etc.
I put a 1/8″ by 5/16″ carbon fiber beam down the center of every neck. Probably overkill for a ukulele neck, but it is real cheap insurance against the neck warping, or distorting under the string tension. I route a channel down the center of the neck to accept the beam. The dimensions of the beam, and the router bit, are exact in width so the beam fits with a stiff push. I used to epoxy the beam in, but it was very messy, and the beam fits so tightly that I figure I scraped most of the epoxy off the sides of the channel fitting in the beam. Now I insert the beam, make sure it is down in the slot, and then run thin CA glue along to fix it in place.
I put the beam in last. The slot becomes the reference center of the neck, and is used with various jigs to easily carry out operations on the neck, in a very exact way. For example, I have a jig used to route the rough profile of the heel. It is slotted for a 3/4″ aluminum bar (used on other jigs), which has centered 1/8″ pins. With the bar in place, the slot in the neck fits over the pins, and slides up against the heel profile, against which I run a router with a bearing on the jig to easily cut the rough heel profile.
