About friction tuners. If you read my first post (I'm a newbie), you would see that is how I broke a tuner on my cheapie Uke. Actually I'm glad I did, because that is when I felt I wanted to take Uke more seriously, and buy a better uke anyway. That gave me the incentive to do just that which resulted in my purchase of my solid mahogany Ohana. But, the cheaper uke I had to really crank down on the tuners to make them hold. They didn't seem to want to hold at all until I did. BUT, like mentioned above that resulted in having to turn hard to get them to move. This resulted in busting a tuning nut. I could have just replaced the nut, or better yet, the tuners (which I also did) but it just gave me the incentive to buy a better uke anyway. So, I bought a set of geared tuners for the cheapie uke, and my Ohana. I didn't look back. I LOVE the Ohana. Very nice action, and is a joy to play, and it doesn't fight me like the cheap Kola uke did. If I stayed with the Kola uke, I may very well have gotten frustrated and gave up the Uke altogether, so I am glad I ditched it when I did, and just bought a better playing instrument.