Ukulele Number One

    Since moving to eastern Washington I have met a wonderful new friend, Bill Willis, who loves to make ukuleles.  Bill is an chemical engineer by profession and is a serious detail guy.  He has put his heart and soul into his hobby and has produced some gorgeous instruments. Even better, he was willing to share his talents and accepted me as an apprentice ukulele maker.

     As it just so happened I had a one inch thick birch board left over from a tree that used to grow at the corner of our yard in Snohomish.  The tree had been cut down by the power company because it grew too close to our power lines. They offered to cut it into firewood length for me, but I asked them to cut them into ten foot logs.  I had no idea what I would ever do with the wood, but it seemed a waste to turn this birch tree into firewood.  I then persuaded my son-in-law to help me load it onto a truck so I could haul it over to the house of a friend who owned a Wood Miser bandsaw mill.  Ten foot long freshly cut birch logs happen to be somewhat heavy. The slab cut boards ended up at the Beez Neez Apiary Supply where they dried until they became useable lumber. I used most of the wood for various projects at the bee store. Apparently, none of the projects were very memorable as I honestly can't recall what I did with a whole birch tree. However, I had this one board left, and it coincidentally had come from the middle portion of the tree so it was close to quarter sawn. That happens to be important when you are selecting wood to make into the body of an ukulele or guitar. It also had some beautiful spalt, which is a type of figure left in the wood by a fungus.

     I took my birch board over to my friend's house  where he resawed it into very thin boards on his bandsaw.  There were a lot of knots to avoid, but we ended up with some nice useable pieces for the back, front, and sides of an ukulele.  I'm not sure as to the exact date we started this project, but it was well over a year ago.  One reason it took so long was the fact that Bill was very patient in giving me the opportunity to do as much of the work as was appropriate for my skill level.  I can only claim to have done about one third of the work, but I was able to watch the entire process from start to finish.

       We finally finished it around the end of May, 2018 and it turned out to be very beautiful. It was so pretty that it was hard to do more than sit around and look at it for a few weeks.  That was just as well as it took several weeks for the strings to stretch sufficiently that I didn't need to retune after each song. I have a lot of photos of the ukulele as it progressed along which I intend to share in this blog. However, I'm now working on several other ukuleles which hopefullywill involve me doing a much greater portion of the work. The body of this first ukulele is made from spalted birch. Black walnut was used for the rosette, the binding, and the veneer on the head piece of the neck.  The neck itself is a combination of maple and black walnut. The fretboard and the bridge are made of macasser ebony, while the nut and saddle are made of Indonesian water buffalo bone. Spruce and pine were used for the internal bracing and the tone bars on the back and front of the ukulele body.

This is just after we glued on the top of the body of the ukulele.  It still needs to be trimmed.

This is a close-up of the black walnut rosette, with Bill's label visible.

This is the back of the ukulele body which still needs to be trimmed.

      I took up playing the Ukulele about five years ago. We do a bi-annual cousin camp for our grandchildren to encourage stronger relationships with their cousins.  We chose to do an Hawaiian theme that year. We had a friend from church who was willing to give hula lessons to some of our grand daughters. That required me to learn half a dozen chords on the ukulele so I could accompany their hula performance. Then Linda bought some cheap ukuleles on line which we made available for the kids throughout our weeklong cousin camp. Now, five years later, about half of our 26 grandchildren play the ukulele.  I therefore have a long waiting list of kids who would like me to make an ukulele for them. I'm only 66 years old and am pretty healthy. We'll see how far I get.

This is the completed ukulele