Finished Sao

Well, After about two months of practice and one month of making, I have finally, almost finished the Sao (neck) on my new shamisen. It’s taken me three months to practice/make the sao which is about the amount of time it took to make a whole shamisen last time. But, after lots of practice, I got the mortise and tenon skills solid enough to start on the real thing.

Now, if I made a one piece neck, I might’ve gotten it done in a week or so but having a three piece neck took a lot more time and patience. Especially for the second mortise somehow. On the first one, it only took me about 4 days to get it nice and flush but the second took weeks and weeks (all because I went off the mark a little when I sawwed the pieces).

It was a very interesting process. Progress was different, visual wise. Let’s take, for example, when I made the body. At the end of a day of lots pounding and chiseling, after seeing the dou pieces I had carved out, I felt I had made lots of progress. Well, it was different with the sao. With getting the sao pieces to connect flush, “progress” was at a much smaller scale. At the end of the day, I’d get the two pieces closer/flusher by a millimeter and I knew I had made progress but it didn’t have the satisfaction as carving out a lot of wood did. However, two months later, (last week) I finally got the neck rounded and planed. It’s very tight too.

Since all that fine mortise work took lots of concentration, I never got around to blogging for a long time (since there wasn’t that much to blog about either) Hopefully, now that I’ve finished the intense part of the making the neck, I’ll be blogging a lot more.