My first glue-up

Well, it being the day before Thanksgiving I got out of the office a bit early. I headed out to the shop to actually start the project.

The kit is organized into neat little steps for the do-it-yourselfer. I guess a professional might do things a bit different, with their experience (and with their larger collection of tools), but these bite-sized steps are great for me. Today I glued the neck block to the sides, which is the first step in the plans. Helpfully the manufacturer provided a caul for gluing the pieces together, making clamping the glue-up easier. In the photo to the left you see the dry pieces as they are delivered in the kit. The sides are taped together to the right in this photo, and the neck block is the smaller piece in the center. The block in the center that has a curve matching the negative space of the neck block is the caul provided with the kit. Gluing was fairly simple - first you tape the sides together end-to-end so that they tightly fit at the top of the neck block; then you mark the centerline of the neck block (because you want the sides to join at the centerline); and then you glue everything together. I used some blue masking tape to tape the sides end-to-end and then did a dry-run to make sure everything was going to fit at the time because you really don't want to be trying to adjust clamps to span the item while the glue is wet.

Here you can see the sides taped together with the neck block and caul. You can also see some waxed paper I used to keep the entire assembly from getting glued to my work table.


After preparing all the pieces and getting my glue-up tray and a cup of water to hand I was ready to start. I spread glue on the neck block using a plumber's flux brush (recommended by the instructions, but also how I normally spread glue in my shop when working on other things). After spreading the glue as evenly as possible I carefully aligned the seam in the sides (where they are taped together) with the neck block centerline and pressed the entire assembly into the caul. While doing this I noticed that the block is slightly narrower than the sides. Since the instructions recommend working on a flat surface to keep everything level and flat and do not tell me how to arrange the block relative to the sides I just kept one side of the block and one edge of the sides flush to my table, which is made of MDF and is actually very flat. I'm not sure how this is going to work out for me but that's what I did. Hopefully it won't end up being a terrible mistake. Anyway, I then applied three clamps to the block/caul system to allow the glue to set, making sure that the block remained aligned with the seam and that the edge of the sides/edge of the block remained aligned as noted above. After some consideration of the clamping force I added two clamps to the glue-up from the other side to try to get more even pressure. The resulting glue-up is shown in the last photo to the right. I used a piece of waxed paper between the caul and the sides to ensure that the caul would not become a permanent part of the mandolin, too.