I apparently was not, but I did not realize the error of my ways until I was looking at the pictures while reviewing the last post to this very blog. But first, a little humor.
“Luthier” is a French word that means “one who swears a lot”.
Now the specifics: If you look carefully at the previously posted pictures you will note (as I did) that one of the ukuleles does not seem to have a side sound port. But I put side sound ports in virtually all the instruments I build these days, what’s wrong? Well, I glued the top and back onto the wrong side of the sides. Since I put the sound port in first, this means that the port was on the right side of the instrument rather than the left! [insert luthier swear words here] What to do? I could just continue and make this a left-handed instrument, but I have only ever had one call for a left-handed instrument, so I did not want to do that. I briefly considered other things like putting in another sound port so there would be two, one on each side, but rejected all these ideas. The only real solution was to practice my ‘de-construction’ skills, meaning, take the top and back off the sides, and then glue them on the right way.
So I got out a syringe of water and an iron to heat things, a sharp knife for separating the seam, and went at it. Things went better than I expected, and in an hour I had both the top and back off, with no damage to either. Put back the blue tape with the arrow indicating the top, which is my usual practice to avoid just this situation (which I must have done backwards before), clean the edges up, and things are ready to be glued on the correct way.
-Crisis averted. Lutherie is a continuous process of covering up ones mistakes!