stability of solid mahogany?

answers to this question may will probably have different answers but anyone ever have a solid mahogany uke crack from not being humidified enough? i know you should take care of your ukulele if its solid regardless of wood but just for future references whats the longest youve ever left your ukulele in a room with maybe 30% humidity at least?

Hardwoods can't take that sort of dryness - Mahogany is better than most.

I still remember the winter I moved to Virginia from Louisiana. Sitting at my desk, over the course of two hours, I heard the snap, crackle and pop of two Mahogany Ukuleles splitting.

Don't know the time they were exposed to that low humidity (later found that it was probably mid-twenties), but those instruments had survived 50 years of winters before I unwittingly left them unprotected.

Modern heating and AC, along with "energy saving insulation" puts solid wood instruments at greater risk than in years gone by.

Mahogany is not to blame. It's one of the more stable.

Rosewood is better known for it's susceptibility. Lots of old split Brazilian Rosewood guitars.

I have a 70 year old mahogany Martin that was in a war before I got it (at least I am assuming that from the original case) and then sat on the top of a bookshelf at my dads with no concern to humidity for 20 years and it is fine. It is humidified now because I figure it might explode from my mind-melting solos...but it is stable as heck as my mom is either running the heater or the AC 24/7 and that did not kill it.
I am probably lucky as heck, but it has been properly abused with no signs of cracking for a long time

TCK said:

I have a 70 year old mahogany Martin that was in a war before I got it (at least I am assuming that from the original case) and then sat on the top of a bookshelf at my dads with no concern to humidity for 20 years and it is fine. It is humidified now because I figure it might explode from my mind-melting solos...but it is stable as heck as my mom is either running the heater or the AC 24/7 and that did not kill it.
I am probably lucky as heck, but it has been properly abused with no signs of cracking for a long time

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Was it in the case for those 20 years?

This probably won't answer your question, since I've only had my mahogany uke for a couple of years and I don't dare leave it out and not humidified here. Up here in the high desert our humidity is so variable, a couple of weeks ago it was in the 60-70% range then down below 20% for a week, now back around 35%. Over the years I've had guitar tops crack (moving back and forth from Hawai'i probably didn't help!), but luckily so far no ukes cracked. But I'm now pretty obsessive about keeping my instruments humidified.

ld: Old fart speaking here:

I have my father-in-law's early 1960s Silvertone, solid mahogany uke that has survived nearly fifty years of neglect and abuse. No more. It now lives in a nice tweed case and in a humidity-controlled environment, as do my guitars. I have humidistats in three rooms of my house. I try to keep the humidity between 40% and 60% at all times. When it goes lower, all my solid instruments go in their cases with humidifiers. I have guitars that, even if I were to be able to get the insurance value on them, are irreplaceable and I'm a little bit of a fanatic about making sure they don't crack. That said, I have a sweet, sweet, sweet little vintage classical guitar (built in 1968) that has three scary cracks in the top and sounds great, so I'm not having those cracks repaired until they become problematic. I go without sleep in the winter trying to keep the humidity up in the house. Ignorance was bliss. Knowledge is stressful sometimes.

All solid instruments should be humidified if at all possible, but think about this: There are a lot of vintage instruments out there (Neil Young's Martin guitar that belonged to Hank Williams, for one) that were schlepped all over the country in non-air-conditioned cars (probably in the trunk or back seat, sometimes not even in a case), lived in conditions that were not even remotely climate-controlled, and which still sound great today and which fetch five figures or more on the open market.

You can get a very good humidistat at Walmart for around ten bucks. I have a top shelf, VERY accurate, analog humidistat from France that I paid an arm and a leg for and the ten buck Walmart humidistat consistently shows the same readings, so I'm confident that the Walmart humidistats are accurate. And, no, I'm not going to tell you what I paid for the French one. It's too embarrassing.

Obviously, we want to keep our treasured instruments from as much damage as we can. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, our best just isn't enough and we have to live/deal with the results. That's why we have luthiers/repairpersons who are competent to keep our babies alive and well. I'm fortunate that I live in Austin, TX and have access to the same luthier who keeps Willie's guitar "Trigger" functioning. His prices are competitive and I figure if he can keep Trigger going, he can definitely deal with anything I can throw at him.

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