Setting up a Waterman soprano

LorenFL

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Bought a Waterman soprano. Pretty sure it was a store display model. It's got Aquila strings and they seem to be pre-stretched. (it stays pretty much in tune) And, as Waterman ukes are prone to do, the bridge is tilted a bit towards the head.

The action is a bit high for my tastes, and the bridge error is causing the intonation to be off.

These things aren't supposed to be adjustable, but I have files and sandpaper and I'm not afraid to use them!

I'm going to start by documenting a few measurements and the specific intonation problems so that we know what we're starting with.
 
It's a Soprano scale uke, and I'm going to assume that the basic specs are typical. Not going to measure the scale and all that.

Critical Measurements:

String height at the bridge from the top is 9mm (0.36")

Saddle is molded into the bridge, but the saddle height is a touch over 1mm. (.040")

Action at 12th fret is 4mm (0.16")

Action at 1st fret is 1mm (.040")

Zero fret height is 1.75mm (.070") from fretboard.

Fret height is about .6mm (.024") from fretboard.

Intonation:

Open 2nd 5th 12th
G +5 +11 +19
C +9 +22 +34
E +11 +24 +38
A +11 +21 +42
 
Action is too high. Intonation is sharp.

Step 1: Lower the saddle.

Now, years of working with sport car suspension modifications has taught me that you should always only make one change at a time so that you can tell what difference that one change made. But, I'm lazy and want to try to get away with only unstringing this uke once if I can get away with it. So, naturally, I'm going to shave the zero fret at the same time!

Step 2: Lower the zero fret.

Step 2a: Shave the nut slots if necessary.

Results:

Saddle height is now about 0.6mm (.025-.030") off of the bridge. I could go a little lower, but since it's not a replaceable saddle, I'm being conservative.

I took about .3mm off of the zero fret. bringing it to about 0.7mm (.025") off of the fretboard. Hope I didn't go too far with that.

I put two layers of tape over the zero fret, and then shaved the nut slots (with a breakover toward the tuners) to where it just started to cut into the tape.

Time to string it back up!
 
Ugh. Good news and bad news.

Action at 12 = 3.2mm (.125")

Action at 1 = 0.7mm (.028")

Intonation is somewhat improved, but still bad.

Open 2nd 5th 12th
G +4 +10 +12
C +3 +3 +4
E +10 +18 +25
A +11 +26 +38

The bad news is that I've created a buzz on 3 of 4 strings! Apparently, the saddle height is so low that it's creating a buzz on the tail end of the strings. If I put a finger back there, it stops!

I might have to ponder how to proceed from here.

I can stick a toothpick behind the saddle. That would raise the saddle height and bring the action back up (bad), but also make the scale length slightly longer, which should improve intonation. And that restored height might eliminate the buzz.
 
Slipping a toothpick behind what's left of the saddle definitely fixed the buzz. But, it raised the action too much, and made the intonation worse.

I'll have to play with this some more... maybe tomorrow.

The big problem with the Waterman seems to be the bridge design.
 
Toothpick was way too tall, but was a good quick experiment.

Today, I shaved a thin piece of scrap pine about .75mm thick, a couple mm wide and crammed it behind the stub of the molded saddle. I think I'm onto something! That put the action back down close to 3mm at the 12th. And intonation is at about +6 to +8 on the G and C strings at the 12th.

I think I'm going to take a standard plastic saddle, turn it sideways, and recreate the wooden shim that I made today. I'll make the top of it "peaked" so that I can move the string contact point further back by maybe another half mm and try to make the whole think as low as I can to improve the action.

The only other thing I might do is take just the tiniest bit more off of the zero fret.

All of that should get the action about as low as I can get it without going completely crazy on that bridge. Should be just at or under 3mm. And it should get the intonation within about +5, which I guess is okay.
 
Everything is better with pictures.

Here's a top view of my "saddle", which is really more of a shim.

PXL_20210220_202648771.jpg

And a side view of same. You can sort of see how low I trimmed the original molded saddle. My shim effectively moves the saddle back.

PXL_20210220_202542745.jpg
 
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Good luck. Unless Makala has changed the materials, the uke is 100% plastic, so there’s not much you can do that’s correctable.
 
It looks like a lot of work for a plastic uke but it seems you are enjoying the process so more power to you.
 
Are you still using the original strings? I changed mine to D'Addario titanium and it is much better to me.
 
The good thing about putting all that work into a plastic uke is you learn a lot in a low-risk environment. And you are unlikely to ever encounter another uke that bad, so it’s like a master class. What I learned from setting up Dolphins and Sharks for kids and grandkids is I’m sick of doing it. I buy Kmise or Enya from Amazon now and if I ever get one that’s not spot on, I’ll send it back.
 
It is a disgrace that a company like Kala should turn out the heap of junk that is the Waterman uke. Given the success of the Maccaferri Islander in years gone by, one would imagine that a company with Kala's experience would have found producing a modern successor relatively straightforward, but, no, they didn't. They made a complete bodge of it. The Islander is a lovely instrument, beautifully designed (a copy of the Martin style 0), and a joy to play. It should have been very easy for an established ukulele manufacturer to produce a machine to turn out a modern plastic copy of a classic ukulele design but Kala failed.
 
It should have been very easy for an established ukulele manufacturer to produce a machine to turn out a modern plastic copy of a classic ukulele design but Kala failed.

I tend to agree. They put a lot of engineering into this thing. It's got molded fan bracing, a necked sound hole that is probably some kind of resonator enhancement to improve volume (which it DOES have). All they really needed to do was make the soundboard rigid enough for the bridge to not fold in under the string tension.

It's like they designed it, and then didn't do any long-term testing.

I've been having too much fun playing with my "proper" cheap laminate uke in my spare time this week to bother with the Waterman. I expect it will end up going to my sister's kids.
 
You might be onto something!

What it probably comes down to is that they hired engineers with no musical/luthier experience to effectively make a plastic copy of one of their existing designs. I've got a VERY LITTLE experience playing with how to fix intonation issues on cheap ukes. But, that's probably more than the engineers who designed the plastic molds for this uke have.

Used to see the same thing in my short stint in the aviation industry. I worked as an "instrumentation tech" in the flight test department. Cool job. We got to put instrumentation on EVERYTHING on a new experimental airplane. Temperatures, pressures, how much the pilot moved a pedal or control yoke, and how much the control surfaces moved relative to that, etc. You name it, we had to figure out how to measure it. We had engineers who had started out as technicians or were otherwise VERY experienced, and they could churn out plans (blueprints) for an instrumentation installation, and it would just plain work. If you handed the same job to one of the 20-something fresh-out-of-college engineers, you'd come up with something that looked great on paper, but sometimes would be physically impossible to install on the airplane because they didn't consider the fact that the real world is different from the CAD environment! (for instance, we couldn't physically fit the bracket that they designed through the access hole that we had to work with... things like that)

So, yeah. The Kala top flexes and lets the bridge move, and it's NOT okay! It's a fatal design flaw. Somebody should have picked up on that before putting them on the market.
 
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