Australian/New Zealand Luthiers Forum

Thanks Bill and Allen. That rosette ... well, I THOUGHT about having someone laser engrave it for me, but in the end I cheated instead. Using WordArt, I designed the name/date to fit around a circle and found a font that would print it in letters only 1/8" high. Then I made a 1/4" rosette out of aba...

Here's a tenor uke I was asked to build. I suppose you could call it a commemorative uke. Apart from the slotted headstock, its special feature is the rosette, bearing the owner's son's date of birth. This uke has a koa top with Victorian blackwood back and sides. Internally, I use five small fan br...

Hello John, Martin, Mike, Phil and Kim, Thanks for your kind words. Some of you asked a few questions. John, I haven't been totally slacking off this year. I've built quite a few ukes and I'm almost finished another dreadnought guitar, this time with ziricote back and sides and a bearclaw Sitka top....

Here are a few pics of the walnut/spruce guitar:

Cheers, David.

It may have taken me some time to get around to this, but here are a couple of finished guitars. Actually, I finished them about 8 weeks ago, and it's taken me a while to get the pics up for display. Perhaps I should have put the pics in the Gallery section, but the guitars started off here. so ... ...

If you happen to live on the east side of Melbourne, then a visit to Pete's Bargain Centre at Chirnside Park is worthwhile. He carries a huge selection of papers, linishing belts, sanding discs etc. I paper my thicknessing sander with BI-I-IG linishing belts from Pete's that I cut down myself with a...

I bought the front of a cedar chest at a garage sale once, and made a tenor uke out of it. I'm attaching a few low res pics. The uke sounded good, but perhaps I made the top a little on the lightweight side because after a time it developed a longitudinal crack behind the bridge, which I then had to...

I have never used King Billy as a guitar soundboard. I have in the back of my mind that Maton originally tried it on their Australian Series guitars but soon substituted it with spruce (for reasons unknown) making them semi-Australian, I suppose. However, after reading some of Peter's printed work, ...

Hello John, A few years ago I was asked to build a baritone uke from spalted myrtle/King Billy. Having finished the job I was invited to a folk club by the fellow who ordered the uke. Well, when I say finished, it was 'in the white', but he'd be able to see what it was going to look like. Whilst loa...

myrtletenor2.jpg I can't match some of the stories you guys have just told, but I'm attaching a couple of pics of a tenor uke that I made recently. The back of it is spalted myrtle, salvaged from a 1970s bedhead thrown out in hard garbage a few years ago. It was three boards glued together. The top...

Hello Lillian,

I don't know you, but it sounds like you've come from left field to identify my mystery wood! Thank you!!

Cheers, David

PS I'll consider I know you now ...

Okay, I got the scales and ruler out and worked out the density in g/cc. It's not as dense as I'd have guessed. Around 0.7 g/cc. It's one of those woods that won't need pore filling - you can't see any pores! You can notice in the pics that there's a bit of faint diagonal fiddleback in the wood. I'm...

Here's a bit of wood I got from Mathews Timber in Melbourne a few years ago. It was supposed to be the last bit of a bigger plank from which veneers had been taken. It's heavy - I haven't done measurements but it's up around rosewood density. It has no smell when you scrape it. It's got spider webbi...

Sorry, I shouldn't write twice in a row. But I just found a picture of the back of that uke, which was also commissioned with a Fender-esque headstock. And yes, I've used four of the six Gotoh tele heads (or maybe they're Grovers) Either way, they fit alright but I think the peghead was made a littl...

Hello John,

Here's a pic of a uke I was asked to make a couple of years ago. From memory, I just used lightweight Gotoh Telecaster tuners, of the quick loading variety with a slot in the tuner post where a hole shoud be. (Never did work out why they call them quick loaders!)

Cheers, David.

Hi Rob, The tops of both guitars are built in a 30' radius dish, and the backs in a 15' radius dish. The veneer is pressed into a slight radius with a flexible caul to get even pressure over the whole area, and held in place to dry by 12 or 15 sticks in my go bar deck. I keep the top in the dish and...

Hello Rob, Very observant of you! There IS a veneer above the upper transverse brace. About .5 or .7 mm cross grain. Similarly, there is a cross grain patch around the soundhole, about 2 mm thick. The kauri top is taken from a lower angle and didn't have the cross grain veneer installed when I took ...

Yeah, I thought about it a bit before trying the assymmetrical bracing idea. I wasn't perceiving that there was actually a treble side and a bass side to the soundboard; just that if the bracing wasn't regular then there might be more different areas on the soundboard that different frequencies coul...

Late in 2010 I spent a week with Ervin Somogyi at his Oakland workshop doing the guitar voicing class with five other builders. This last year my time has been tied up uke building, but here are two guitars recently started and using some of the know-how from Ervin's course. First is an American Bla...