Don't trust Chinese rulers and other things learned from my first ukulele build.

Tonight I finally got my first Uke build finished! Well really this is the third and hopefully the last time I finished it. The first time I finished it was right after New-Years. But the intonation was wrong.
So I rebuilt the nut.
When that didn't help I rebuilt the saddle. Sill no difference.
Next I filled in a small void between the body and the bridge with ca glue
No luck so I rebuilt the saddle again, releveled the frets, and reworked the nut one more time.
Today at work it hit me. I bought my fretboard from China on eBay for 4 bucks. I didn't even think to check to make sure that it had the right scale length. So I checked it on stew-mac. It was an 1/8th inch long on the nut end. So a couple of minuets with a saw later it was finely fixed! That was just one of many stupid mistakes I made in my first uke build. What's a mistake you made on your first build? How did you fix it?

It might be possible that the problem was from a misplaced bridge and not with the fretboard at all. By cutting off the nut end of the fretboard you would get the right intonation at the 12 fret, but that would throw off the other frets. Hope your problem really was with a too long fretboard between the first fret and the nut... Yes, a $4 fretboard from China isn't probably going to be of the highest quality.

My biggest first uke mistake? Drilling completely through the peghead while drilling screw holes for the tuner. Fix: Slap on a thin piece of veneer. Problem solved and it even looked better.

In my first build I spent ages making a huge and elaborate bridge, just like a guitar. It weighed about half a ton and meant the uke had no volume. As it was just an exercise in building rather than anything else, I fixed the problem with a piezo pick up.
Max