That is awesome. You get to see an instrument made out of your own pieces of wood, fantastic. Those are gorgeous pieces of koa as well. Now that I think about it, Juha might've mentioned this project to me when I was there picking up my uke. I'll have to pry more information out of him when I visit again.
Keep me posted! All I told him was to use the wood I send him and make decisions about bindings etc. himself. I might contact him once again to be sure he uses decent tuners but I'm sure he knows his stuff.
Good to hear that you didn't wait longer than a year; we haven't really talked about delivery time actually.
What stock strings does he use?