Idea for the holidays.

I was thinking of buying some cheap 30 - 90 dollar soprano ukulele, sanding it down, giving it a good polishing/lacquering and then personalizing it.

Would that be a good idea to do over the holidays or would I just be wasting my time?

Bao said:

I was thinking of buying some cheap 30 - 90 dollar soprano ukulele, sanding it down, giving it a good polishing/lacquering and then personalizing it.

Would that be a good idea to do over the holidays or would I just be wasting my time?

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I think this would be a great idea for your close friends and family. Anything personal is 'way better than something from a store.

It depends on how much you like tinkering. You can usually get a cheap uke sounding pretty good if you do a set up job. Or if you can try before you buy you might be able to pick one thatalready sounds good. But the risk at the low end of the priice range is getting a clunker. I would take the risk - if you are willing to repaint it you would not be afraid to modify the string height or the bridge to get it sounding good.

Bao said:

I was thinking of buying some cheap 30 - 90 dollar soprano ukulele, sanding it down, giving it a good polishing/lacquering and then personalizing it.

Would that be a good idea to do over the holidays or would I just be wasting my time?

Click to expand...

I just got a cheap uke off eBay (even though there's a Marca Aquila label inside it was in such sad shape i wonder if someone just stuck that label on there). Anyway I'm doing just what you're considering. I've painted it lime green with a cream fretboard. Today I'll put some red/yellow/black designs on headstock and around the sound hole. Maybe red(?) dots on the 5th/7th/12th frets. It's great fun to paint a ukulele! I'm giving it to a friend for her birthday. I'll post a pic once I've finished.

Really - creating art is never a waste of time.

As someone mentioned, if you can play a bunch of the ukes and cherry pick one that sounds good this might be a fun project. The problem with trying this with a random sample though is that some of them are just "dead" and will never sound good no matter how well they are set up. I had one uke that actually came from the manufacturer set up abolutely perfectly - the best factory setup I've ever seen on any "factory" uke. Unfortunately, playing it was like trying to play a wet dog - there was just no acoustic volume or tone worth mentioning. I gave it away because I couldn't bring myself to sell it in the marketplace and stick someone else with it.

John