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Good morning. Since our last thread on here about lag screws / hanger bolts instead of barrel bolts I decided to give it a shot. I'm making a soprano for my daughter so the first one with the new joint won't leave the house for the next few years. I went for wood screws with a coarse thread and...

I was rummaging through the piles in the workshop, looking for a few neck blanks I knew were there. When I found them it was obvious why they'd sifted down to the bottom of the pile, they were simply no good. One of Spanish cedar had a knot going across it, one of mahogany had worm holes and the...

Yesterday I tried my "new" frame saw for the first time. It's a behemoth I found in an antique store, I paid 250 SEK for it. I sliced a 20 mm thick board, I was going to slice it into three pieces but one cut was quite enough for one day. I got it off after over an hour and the rest I'll split...

Hi friends, I see most of you are good. I’m having a bit of love / hate situation with the internetz right now so I haven’t posted much anywhere. But I read all your posts and am truly grateful that at least some forums (fora) still lives. I have finished some ukes recently and will post pics...

Hiya folks. Haven't had anything to show here for some time. One year ago I had a rough customer and it sort of drained my enthusiasm so nothing much happened for a while after that. But you know the bug, once you've got it you cannot fight it. So I built a couple of ukes for myself and then I...

My workshop cluttered up. Yeah I know, doesn't sound too bad does it. But it was a mess. The mess to end all other messes. All surfaces were covered in tools. The tools were covered in shavings and sawdust. I had literally no space to put a tool down without hitting three other tools. How do...

I do it like this, on the uke shown it came out quite straight but it's easy to fudge things up a bit. Then, of course, the wonkiness should be interpreted as mojo.

I do that on all my ukes. As Chris says, a few minutes work is all it takes. I've played loads of ukes with straight saddles and it seldom bothers me, but mine are better in case one checks intonation with a tuner. And it looks classy. A few pics:

It's finally a reality, the thing you've all dreamed of - a portable ukulele. Gone are the days of unwieldy heavy sopranos and strange compromises such as the Argapa piccolos. Seriously though, I think the Risa stick uke is a great design but it's heavy and somewhat quiet unplugged. The moment I...

The title isn't dead serious. I'm not a pro builder and I can easily get enough material for my builds. But look at this vid from a Chinese guitar maker. The fact that the factory is in China is of less importance, it could be anywhere and still frighten me with draining the wood supplies and...

Today I've put strings on seven ukes, six resos and one eight string soprano, which is my number 100. I'm very pleased with how they all turned out and that they finally are finished. I'll paste some pics on here tomorrow but for now a link to the blog will have to suffice...

When I flew to South America last week I had, for the long flights, a single piece of reading material with me. It was the Stewmac catalogue and I studied it more thoroughly than usual. I find it to be a great source of inspiration. Yes, their tools are expensive and it's possible to buy Chinese...

I don't know if I've worn down your ears complaining about my rickety router table and my near lethal work when making the plywood skeletons for my resonator ukes. Suffice to say, I am very happy I still have all my fingers. Making the skeletons took a long time and consistency could have been...

Eight years ago I was looking online for how to tune a ukulele. Now I have converted part of my home to a workshop and built close to 100 ukes. All started by finding forums, or fora, first ezfolk then uketalk, ukulelecosmos, ukuleleunderground and the now sadly defunct Swedish forum...

I've seen studies like this one before, but not nearly as ambitious. It concerns differences between traditional and non traditional woods in classical guitars, which translates as tropical and non tropical woods. Does it concern ukes? No. Yes. Well maybe. Or? Anyway I just prepared some...

Sometimes I say to myself that they're not worth the trouble, but I keep building them anyway. Resonator ukuleles has a mojo of their own but lack some aspects (quite many actually) of the magic I like about assembling acoustic ukes. My resos are built like tanks on a sturdy plywood skeleton but...

My tip would be to choose a recognizable shape before scaling it down. I've made a few micro ukes and I think their raison d'être is being miniature versions of larger instruments. It's fiddly to bend a minuscule figure eight body though so you'd might want to start with a pineapple shape...

Yeah this might be far fetched but... if your wife is out with friends, and you don't mind not knowing Swedish, and you enjoy 40 year old footage of a thousand year old tradition then this is a must see. It's an old documentary about three brothers and their father (called Napoleon) building...

Well I never recommend anyone doing things the way I do, but I don't have a problem showing my methods off. This weekend I dug out a mahogany board from the 1960's that my dad bought for a boat project. It was a couple of metres long, tapered from 300 to 400 mm in width and was only 15 mm thick...

This is similar to what I use: