Tools

Before you can begin building instruments, you need some tools and equipment. I already had a good assortment of woodworking tools, but one thing that's essential is a way to create thin sheets of wood for backs, tops and sides. Imagine a sheet of wood that's thinner than a slice of cheese and maybe as big as a single newspaper page. It's possible to hand plane such a piece of wood, but power tools make the process much easier.
I already had a thickness planer.

Rigid 12" thickness planer

 It's able to take wood down to an eighth of an inch (even thinner if you put something under the wood as you run it through) but the planer uses rapidly rotating knives to thin the wood, so if the wood is too thin, some tearing (or worse) might occur). That's why I needed a drum sander.

Home made drum sander

A drum sander has sandpaper wrapped around a rotating cylinder (drum) and a mechanism to regulate the distance from the drum to the feed table. Drum sanders are expensive (I eventually bought a commercial one, but wasn't ready to invest the money at this initial stage), so I made my own—as an attachment to my wood lathe. The table was an old piece of counter top fastened to a base with a piano hinge. I devised a cam lever to raise and lower the table. The drum is a piece of ABS sewer pipe with wood blocks in the ends. It's clamped between the lathe's centers. Sandpaper is wrapped around the drum and secured with nylon wire ties.

Craftsman bandsaw

Several more power tools are important:  a table saw, a bandsaw, stationary belt sander and a drill press. I also have a Delta scrollsaw and a wood lathe, as well as a Jet drum sander and the usual assortment of powered hand tools. The bandsaw allows you to cut curves, and it can also saw a board into two thinner boards (called resawing). It's important that the blade guide can be raised high enough to resaw a board half as wide as the finished width of the instrument you're making. Tenor ukuleles are about 9" wide at the widest point (called the lower bout), so the bandsaw would need to resaw a 4½” board. Mine handles widths up to 7½".

My drill press is used for many things besides drilling. I cut the soundhole in the instrument top using a fly cutter. I have several, all preset to specific dimensions. I also have an assortment of small sanding drums that are invaluable when shaping necks.

Shop Fox stationary belt sander

The stationary belt sander I use is made by Shop Fox. There are many stationary belt sanders out there, but this one easily converts from horizontal to vertical, making it a good edge sander. I also allows me to make use of the end rollers to sand curves, and I've made a fence that turns the end roller into a small-scale thickness sander—very useful for small parts such as bridge saddles.