Making braces

The new year has seen me shipping two ukes already, and I am currently working on four more; a piccolo, two resos, and a soprano of walnut and cedar. I've done the rather tedious job of thickness sanding all the wood (plus a large number of fretboards) so it'll be the pleasant wind-in-the-back feeling of assembly for a while. I didn't sand the cedar though, that was hand planed to thickness. 

Yesterday I made the braces for the piccolo, and put the neck block and the kerfed linings in the bent sides. I made the braces from old wood reclaimed from a loom, lovely stuff. 

I split the wood with a knife to get the grain perfectly straight, then planed the braces with my Lie-Nielsen no.1, which is a great plane for small jobs. 

I make the profile with my knife, but I do use both hands off camera. 

Here they are, ready for glueing. And in the last pic they're glued.