Getting the neck ready

Now that I know where my sound holes are going, it made sense to modify the end of the fret-board to suit. Im not sure what this fret-board is made of. It certainly looks like wood, but it cuts, and smells like a dense plastic (though it appears to have a grain and fibres) I'm guessing that the Ohana that is came from was no more than 30 quid so it could be wood... but then again it could be plastic!
The other delicate bit of work to do was shaping and flattening the neck block to suit the flat sided cigar box - the neck originally came from a figure of eight ukulele and so the neck block had a slight concave shape to it that would have fitted the curved body of the original uke. A bit of jigging and some flat sanding blocks seems to have kept everything square (enough).

And then finally I drilled a couple of holes for the fixing dowls. Some cheap ukes dont bother with these and simply rely on a flat glued joint. I preferred to take the trouble to make a drilling template and drilling jig to ensure square and accurate positioning for the dowls that will give the instrument a lot of strength at this point where the tension of the strings will eventually create a lot of stress.