How long to dry out.

It is the time of year to start talking about humidity, hygrometers, and humidifiers, and I take it seriously. I mean, why wouldn't I protect my investment? And I do take care to keep my ukulele humidified. But also, seriously, how fast does a ukulele dry out? I get the feeling that some people think that the humidity falls below 35% and their ukulele explodes, or maybe implodes.

So here is my story. My grandfather was a fiddler, and he brought a fiddle back from France after WWI. He played it at dances and in bars. He was quite the fiddler and quite the carouser, according to family lore. He died when my mother was three. My mother played that same fiddle in high school, what, maybe twelve years after he passed? I'm quite sure that she never even considered the humidity. My mother gave it to me twenty years ago, and I had a violin teacher at the university look at it. He said that it was drying out and that the back was separating, but that it was still playable, and I remember him playing it. I put it up on a shelf in the family room and hardly touched it. I never played it. It sat on that shelf for at least ten years, then went to the basement. A few weeks ago a friend who is learning to play violin went to tune it up, and the neck came off. He took it to a Violin Luthier, who said that the whole thing was dryed out and should be rebuilt, but that he could probably clean it up and glue the neck back on, and it might be playable.

We are talking one hundred years or more here. Just wondering how long it takes a ukulele to crack, separate, then become unplayable due to drying?

It don't think the answer can be "x". It depends on so many factors. One big factor is how rapid is the change? Slower changes may be less impactful than rapid changes. This is true both of relative humidity and temperature.

McCabes Guitar Shop which is quite close to me and sells many high end instruments, doesn't humidify at all. And I've been in many stores that don't. Yes, we live in SoCal and many months it's not much of a concern. But to me that suggests that if it short-term exposure to low humidity was highly likely to cause damage, they would have never lasted in business as long as they have.

Me? I run a whole house humidifier and I monitor levels. When I go out of town I case my instruments with humidifiers. I have a few instruments that are not replaceable. I don't want to take the risk.

I dont have an answer for you, but share your concern about humidity and really I find it all a PITA since having bought several all-solid wood ukes over the summer.

They are in cases with case humidifiers and I also have a room humidifier, but struggle to keep the room humidity above 35% as per the Caliber IV hygrometer I bought from David Burgess as per a recommendation from Recstar24, so I am hesitant to even take them out in the winter for fear of damage.

Without the room humidifier (which holds about 3 gallons of water and runs thru it in 24 hrs when turned all the way up), the ambient humidity in my music room drops below 20%. I would likely to have to get a second unit for the same space and refill about 6 gallons of water per day to keep them running 24/7 during the winter, to MAYBE get up to 45-50% RH. I dont want that burden, it's too much for me.

This is not why I got these ukes, I got them to play and I do NOT enjoy the stress and worry that OMG they are going to warp, crack or die if they dry out.

Maybe I have been misinformed or have misunderstood the long-term effects of low humidity, but the worry about humidity is a major detractor in my enjoyment of playing ukulele.

Honestly, I'm quite fed up with it all, and likely going to re-home them soon and continue to play my all-weather Flukes, Fleas and nice cheapo laminates.

One thing to add - since Luthiers are by nature of the job dealing with long-term storage of billets, slabs and other cuts of tonewoods, you might get a more educated and hands-on reply to your original question if you ask this kind of query in the Uke Builders/Luthier's Lounge section of the forum, as opposed the anticipated wide spectrum of anecdotal opinions from the rest of us plebian ukers. <-- Just a thought...

My experience as a hobby builder is that large and repeated humidity swings are the killer. Slow changes are less damaging.

In theory wood will only crack if humidity goes appreciably below the humidity at which it was glued to whatever resists the shrinking (bracing and sides for a uke). High humidity swells the uke, and thus stresses those resisting glue joints. So they might fail, but it shouldn't crack.

But you can see that swinging between extremes will stress the wood, so that any weak spots are likely to give way.

One uke I made was cracked within a few weeks by living next to a radiator on which washing was dried. But I have a 1920s Kumalae with no cracks, probably because it never lived in a house that was properly heated by US standards.

So your answer is, it depends

But I would say that low enough humidity, no matter how slowly you get there, produces a risk of cracks within days, and if you get there fast, within hours.

And I've realised that the OP thinks of this as "drying out". Not so. Once wood has been dried to equilibrium, which should be before building, it spends its life absorbing and losing moisture, oscillating around that selected equilibrium.

Builders tend to aim for equilibrium around 45% humidity, if they have that level of control. Long periods below that, say at 35%, will be risky. Short periods at 25% are bad news.

I live in an old house in the UK, so I'll never see those numbers unless I leave a uke next to a radiator! I gather that many US houses drop to those levels in winter.

Somewhere between 0 and 100 years just like the violin would be my guess