Hate to dig up an old thread, but someone else might need to know.
This is what I got from Kevin Keith, of the REAL Cocobolo Ukuleles, after asking him about this:
"Luis Pilarte is a different luthier here in Nicaragua who doesn't have any affiliation with us. He has been building guitars and selling them locally for years, but now is building ukuleles.
It is clear from his pictures that he is trying to replicate our success as much as possible, even to the point where some of our best customers, such as yourself, do not know if he is affiliated with us. However, pictures can be deceiving, and there are some major differences in our drying processes, construction techniques and in the supplies that we use with our ukuleles.
We dry all of our tonewoods to 6% humidity in our solar dry kiln and store them at 45% relative humidity. Luis leaves his in the natural environment here in Nicaragua, which fluctuates from 60-80% most days. Luis builds his ukuleles with Spanish style construction, which means the top does not overlap the sides and connect strongly to the kerfing, but that the side of the top connect to the side of the side, which isn't a very strong connection and can lead to problems. We import all of our tuners, nickel frets, and strings. Luis uses electric guitar tuners that he buys locally because they are smaller and cheaper, guitar frets which are taller and wider than ukulele frets, and he uses cheap black nylon strings and plastic pins.
I hate to badmouth the competition, but I wish that more people knew what they were getting into before dealing with Luis. I have heard from several of Luis' customers that they were unhappy with the quality of their ukuleles and were unhappy when their ukuleles developed climate related issues after a couple of months. Luis only accepts Western Union payments, which means that the buyer is not protected with defective products and returns as they are with PayPal. In fact, these customers told me that Luis didn't even respond to their emails when they explained the problems to Luis."
So UUers have apparently saved another member from buying the wrong uke!
