Kiwaya/Famous plywood

Is Kiwaya's high quality mahogany and koa plywood, which they use on the laminated Eco series instruments, a proprietary product? It is indeed very thin, and the ukes made with it seem to rival and perhaps even surpass many new or vintage solid ukes.

I'm just curious why, if not proprietary, other uke manufacturers don't source this for use in their instruments (maybe they do, and I'm in the dark here). I imagine it is a bit more expensive, but how much more could it be? Or, maybe other manufacturers don't want to, or can't, match the design/manufacturing expertise required to use this thinner, higher quality laminate?

Good question. I was wondering that myself.

It's possible that they make it themselves from veneer.

The industry can make some very thin 3 ply laminates. such as 1/64" x 4' x 2' or 4'. When I was in the model building period, I got a lot of very thin 1' x 4' sheets. All this is solid -- no knots or problems like that. Amazing that they can skin the wood so thin.

Ralph

Hello Ralph,

We can go a lot thinner than that now. Just search "micro wood veneer"; you'll be amazed. Building a good veneer board (the combination of different layered thicknesses of generally different species, how to align them and glues) to fit within the overall design of the instrument is challenging and rewarding.

The folks at Kiwaya have obviously done their prototyping well; with goals of high quality over low cost. How they construct their laminate would be highly guarded proprietary information. There are folks to the east of them that wouldn't bat an eye at whatever investment they needed to make to produce the results they get at Kiwaya, if only they knew how it was done.