Bit of a cheat on my part this one. For health and safety reasons, I am not allowed to use machinery at guitar school. I jumped out of an aeroplane last week, at 13,000ft, with zero experience but sadly, I cannot even look sideways at a band saw with out getting the H&S crew smashing down my classroom door.

So, to take the piece of wood from where it was, to a ukulele shape, I em…. let my teacher, Mike, take it home and bandsaw it for me. Not how I wanted it to happen, but for the best at the moment. Thanks Mike…. I can move on now…

Once again I have been incredibly lucky whilst hunting for the parts I need to build the SU. This time my luck was such that I met another electric ukulele builder, and a good chap he is.

Peter Howlett builds some very beautiful nylon strung electric ukuleles. He calls them Uklectic, and they are really lovely examples of luthier craftmanship. Peter also runs ukulele building courses and has put lots of good instructional videos up on youtube. I will run an article on them in the next couple of weeks.

Anyway, I was hunting about on ebay for some mahogany to build the SU neck with, when I saw an advert for ‘Quartersawn mahogany guitar neck blank – brick red, dense, nice long length. Tight even grain making stacked heel invisible’. The description went on to say ‘South American mahogany is rare. Quartersawn is even rarer. This blank is 890mm long x 80mm wide x 25mm thick planed one side. It is cut on the perfect quarter so when making a stacked heel you will get an almost invisible look. This is a Brazilian variety which tends to be redder than the pink Honduran/Belize stuff. It is very dense and will take a crisp shape. I have 35 more lengths mostly on the absolute quarter with the same vertical grain to the face side when viewed end on.’

At £10.99 I couldn’t stop myself reaching for the ‘Buy it now’ button, and actually after some email exchange with Peter, ended up buying 2.

Peter says in the description he has more, but at the time of writing, I cannot see any listed in his ebay shop. If you are hunting, you could always try to contact him via his website though.

My pieces arrived this morning, and they do look very good :-

Here is a tricky party of the build. Every steel string electric ukulele I have seen uses a Fender Telecaster style bridge. I am build a Gibson style Uke… I want a Gibson SG Tune-a-matic style bridge and tailpiece. Nobody makes them for 4 string instruments. It is fundamental to the design as well. Fenders have straight necks, Gibsons have a slight angle on their necks. It is the way the bridge works that decides which way the neck should be.

I have bought 2 different types of bridge from Hong Kong using ebay. These were cheapest, I can study their design and draw up my own in CAD and see if I can find somewhere to make me some. Screws and fixings I can reuse from the ones I have bought. Here they are, the first set of pictures show the traditional 2 piece bridge. This one looks easiest to replicate, but of course, is 2 pieces and will take up more of the uke body.

This next one is a single piece version. It is more complicated but will save precious space on the face of the uke.

I am going to draw up both and send the drawings along with the parts away for machining.