Swamp Yankee
Well-known member
I saw a listing from a local music consignment shop on Facebook Marketplace for this Martin S-O uke so I decided to take a ride with my wife to check it out.
What I found hanging among the cheap electric guitars and amps of dubious provenance was a very easy playing, sweet sounding soprano with a great neck carve.
It's very lightly built - too lightly built in fact...the internal bracing does not extend fully across the top or the back, and there's no lining at all. They simply glued the tops and backs to the sides.
In many cases, from what I gather from comments online left by other owners, and from descriptions of sellers, this design feature often results in small cracks developing in the back in the area between where the braces end and the sides. But in this uke's case, it resulted in the back coming away cleanly from the side on the lower bout for about 1/4 of its total circumference.
I ended up paying $75 for this little sweetie pie.
I typically see these listed between $200 with what seems to be the common crack issues mentioned above. Not a lot of information on them..and I can see why Martin dropped them - but I actually like it better than the replacement S-1 series in that it has a 12 fret neck.
I decided this would be the uke that I use to see how well I do handling repairs. If you look closely at the pictures, you'll see the task of re-gluing the back would involve forcing and holding the sides into shape in two directions - to realign the edges, it has to be pushed from the inside outwards along part of the separation, and from the outside inwards along the rest - as well as clamping it to let the glue set.
Currently I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to remove the entire back and fit it with new braces and kerfed linings - or maybe I'll just reglue it as it is .....dunno.
Has anyone rebuilt one of these with linings? I'd think back linings would not adversely affect the tone too much....though top linings might..
What I found hanging among the cheap electric guitars and amps of dubious provenance was a very easy playing, sweet sounding soprano with a great neck carve.
It's very lightly built - too lightly built in fact...the internal bracing does not extend fully across the top or the back, and there's no lining at all. They simply glued the tops and backs to the sides.
In many cases, from what I gather from comments online left by other owners, and from descriptions of sellers, this design feature often results in small cracks developing in the back in the area between where the braces end and the sides. But in this uke's case, it resulted in the back coming away cleanly from the side on the lower bout for about 1/4 of its total circumference.
I ended up paying $75 for this little sweetie pie.
I typically see these listed between $200 with what seems to be the common crack issues mentioned above. Not a lot of information on them..and I can see why Martin dropped them - but I actually like it better than the replacement S-1 series in that it has a 12 fret neck.
I decided this would be the uke that I use to see how well I do handling repairs. If you look closely at the pictures, you'll see the task of re-gluing the back would involve forcing and holding the sides into shape in two directions - to realign the edges, it has to be pushed from the inside outwards along part of the separation, and from the outside inwards along the rest - as well as clamping it to let the glue set.
Currently I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to remove the entire back and fit it with new braces and kerfed linings - or maybe I'll just reglue it as it is .....dunno.
Has anyone rebuilt one of these with linings? I'd think back linings would not adversely affect the tone too much....though top linings might..
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