besley
Well-known member
There have been a lot of posts here by people who have been very happy with their super inexpensive Enya ukes over the last few months. I was looking for a knock-a-about uke to keep by my desk, so I ordered their HPL Enya EUT-X1 a few months ago. I really liked the idea of no maintenance HPL on the body with Richlite on the fingerboard. No concerns about humidity at all, with a raidused fretboard to boot.
When it arrived I expected the action to be a bit high, but not to be lopsided the way it was. The action at the 12th fret was 3.1 mm on the first string, and just 2.3 mm on the 4th. I thought that maybe the saddle hadn't been filed correctly, so I removed it, and found that the problem was the saddle slot itself was lopsided, being 0.8 mm deeper on one end than the other. There was enough saddle showing for me to sand it down to get about 2.3 to 2.4 mm across the strings, but that sure didn't leave much saddle showing.
But the bigger problem turned out to be the neck. When I first got the uke it seemed fine. But after a couple of months it seemed as if the action was going up. I checked the relief on the neck and found that while it had been almost flat when I received it, the relief was now over 0.015". This would be a high value for a guitar, let alone the short neck of a uke. So the neck had warped in just a few months.
I contacted Enya, and initially they were helpful, sending me replacement saddles. But they insisted that the neck could not warp because if had a radius. (Huh?) And in any case, other people had not complained about their necks warping, so it didn't happen.
As I write this the relief has grown to 0.024" at the fifth fret, which is an absurd amount of bend. I tried to capture the curve of the neck in a photo or two, with a straight edge on the left side of the photo to show that the curvature you see is not a result of the lens.
Anyway, I don't have that much invested in this, so I'm just writing it off an experiment. But I really did want this uke to work, so it's quite a disappointment. Let's hope all of your Enya experiences are better.
When it arrived I expected the action to be a bit high, but not to be lopsided the way it was. The action at the 12th fret was 3.1 mm on the first string, and just 2.3 mm on the 4th. I thought that maybe the saddle hadn't been filed correctly, so I removed it, and found that the problem was the saddle slot itself was lopsided, being 0.8 mm deeper on one end than the other. There was enough saddle showing for me to sand it down to get about 2.3 to 2.4 mm across the strings, but that sure didn't leave much saddle showing.
But the bigger problem turned out to be the neck. When I first got the uke it seemed fine. But after a couple of months it seemed as if the action was going up. I checked the relief on the neck and found that while it had been almost flat when I received it, the relief was now over 0.015". This would be a high value for a guitar, let alone the short neck of a uke. So the neck had warped in just a few months.
I contacted Enya, and initially they were helpful, sending me replacement saddles. But they insisted that the neck could not warp because if had a radius. (Huh?) And in any case, other people had not complained about their necks warping, so it didn't happen.
As I write this the relief has grown to 0.024" at the fifth fret, which is an absurd amount of bend. I tried to capture the curve of the neck in a photo or two, with a straight edge on the left side of the photo to show that the curvature you see is not a result of the lens.
Anyway, I don't have that much invested in this, so I'm just writing it off an experiment. But I really did want this uke to work, so it's quite a disappointment. Let's hope all of your Enya experiences are better.