baritone ukulele

this ukulele i made back in 2005(i think) for my friend Suzanne Vallie  

 the soundboard is from the same batch of salvaged redwood planks that i used on my mandolin top.

 

the back is ebony from the lumber store bargain bin.

 the plates were beautifully bookmatched but on the wrong face.

they were warping in a curve opposite of how i wanted them to go, )l not (l, the back of the uke would have been concave. i actually had to heat bend the back plates like i do to shape the sides.

the sides and the headstock face are walnut which came from a junk piano bench. 

the rest of the bench got used to make a bakery case. i'll post photos of that here soon.

the fingerboard and bridge are padouk i had left over from luthiery school.

 the nut, saddle and inlays are gold acrylic. the rosette is padouk and maple, all the binding is maple.

you can kind of see how the back is heavily braced to keep the ebony from moving back the other way.

the neck is mahogany with no tale. here's the first strap button-on-headstock. i used water based laquer on this instrument in one attempt to abandon the toxic stuff. i didn't really like working with the water based stuff much better and gave up on it after a couple instruments.

tenor ukulele

i built this in 2006 for my friend Kari.  i had just been to the Guild of American Luthiers convention in tacoma so it only took me about a month to complete.

 

a few months after having this uke, Kari left it on top of her car at a show and drove off. it was not around anywhere when she went back to look. 

if anyone knows anything about what happened to this instrument please contact me here!

the top is sitka spruce. the fingerboard, bridge, and trim are purpleheart. 

  the back, sides, and neck are flamed maple that i got as partial trade for a guitar i built.

 Kari named it "the rockstar" because of all the pearloid flash.

the access panel in the endblock was inspired from Harry Fleishman's workshop at the luthier convention. 

 

the removable panel makes electronic and internal repairs far easier. also this is a place for a battery.

 the bracing design is my own, likely inspired by various convention lectures.

 the strap pin at the headstock finial is an idea from a baritone ukulele i had built. i'll post that next.

electric banjo #2

this banjo was made for Terell of the Knotwells. i found the rim, resonator, and tension hoop used super cheap and couldn't pass them up. i only had to build the neck and bridge and order hardware.

the buttons for the tuners came from a guitar at the shop, one of the six had broke. we replaced them with metal buttons and kept the left over five, perfect for a banjo set. 

the neck is walnut with an oil finish and the fingerboard is padouk. i made it in the same style as the electric banjo with the fifth tuner up on the headstock. 

here is a close look at the channel the top string runs through from the fifth fret to the nut. 

the headstock has a burl veneer face that matches the tuner buttons and a matching orange pearloid stripe. the top corner is raised up from the face for a 3-d effect.

 i also had this pickup i had been given broken which i fixed and never used. it works like a magnetic pickup but senses a thin steel strip on the underside of the head instead of the strings.

volume and tone are mounted on the upper bout of the rim. the heel cap is padouk, the bridge is walnut with an ebony cap. i made the flanges out of brass.

built in 2011 date stamped at the end or the fretboard. orange and black pearloid and tortoise vinyl inlays.

electric banjo #1

i built this for the Knotwells former banjo player, joel2 (myself being joel1 or THE joel). here we are side by side, playing a barn show at aspen farm outside of viroqua, wi. this is the only live shot of the banjo i have. i'm playing my paddle bass in this picture by the look of it.

back in those days we were still mainly writing and playing loud and fast. feedback was a constant issue with any acoustic instruments we tried to bring into the band amplified. joel2 had seen some other "solidbody" banjos made by other builders and brought the idea to me.

the concept at work is that the electro-magnetic(guitar-style) pickup is far less prone to feeding back than the piezo or contact pickup (mounted on the drum head) which is more frequently used in acoustic instruments.

so, the guitar pickup is for the loud shows with a p.a. and stage monitors. the piezo is for house shows or practices as it more accurately reproduces the acoustic sound of the banjo. i can't remember how i wired the controls but i think it's mag volume/piezo volume/tone.

the other main feature is the full length 5th string. i had also seen other builders using a similar set up on their banjos and really liked the idea of getting the tuner off the middle of the neck and up on the head with the other tuners where they belong.

the 5th string still begins at the 5th fret as usual, but then goes up to the head though a channel, running under a string ball-end between frets 2 and 3.

the fingerboard is wenge and the inlays are black pearloid shaped like bicycle gears. joel2 co-owned a bike shop in minneapolis before he moved out of state.

the scroll inlay, the corners, and headstock are all supposed to be reminiscent of an f-style mandolin by joel2's design request.

 here's another version of the logo i wish i'd never used.

the body is made of mahogany with a flamed maple top. the neck, cover plates and armrest are flamed maple too. i used a water-based laquer for the sunburst finish. though it was nowhere near as toxic, it was a lot more difficult to sand and buff than regular laquer, so i'll probably not use it anymore either.

really?

i was moving a chair and bumped it into my fridge. of all the places to impact, i hit my cool phillipine guitar magnet square in the middle and cracked the neck in half. i just laughed, "looks like i got some work to do!"

 a drop of glue and my guitar is ready to hold cat pictures once again. i just can't get away from guitar repair.

 

paddle basses

at the complete opposite end of my artistic spectrum from the harbinger fiddle is the paddle bass. it is the solid body electric version of a washtub bass. no frills, just one string made of a bicycle brake cable, and a single coil pickup with volume and tone. the larger one i tuned to A the smaller one to C. you play it by standing on the base and bending the paddle sharp or flat from the open note. i used to play the prototype version (also an A) in the Knotwells when we began so long ago. that one had it's pickup inside of a tin can so it would look like a mini washtub. i still have my prototype, and one of these two is in seattle now. the other is missing.

hardanger fiddle

 i prefer to call this the harbinger fiddle since it doesn't meet all the specifications of a real hardanger. 

firstly and most importantly it was built in minneapolis. 

also, neither the owner nor myself  are norwegian. finally, the body is from a violin which was donated to the shop by a loyal regular. hardangers are arched higher on the top, in other words they have bigger bellies than violins. hardangers also have overlapping f-holes, violins do not.

the painting on the top is called rosing. i went with a slovak/russian inspired design in tribute to myself and the owner respectively. you can see that the top had been split in a few places and was sloppily glued together still gapping in places. the cracks all had to be cleaned out, fit, re-glued and cleated.

the inlays in the fingerboard, tailpiece and corners are made from pipestone(to signify minnesotan origin), corian, blue and abalone colored acrylic, and five snazzy buttons. 

the divider lines are pre-made colored wood. 

i inlayed the corners because they had all been strangely drilled into.

harbinger fiddle is also a more fitting name due to the headstock the owner requested.

 

 the pegs are faced with corian and are supposed to resemble bones. the pegbox on the original neck had broken in half, which is what prompted me to build a new neck in the first place. at the time i was in a band called Eatin' Hogeye with the then future owner who convinced me to build a hardanger neck.

aside from the extravagant decoration on the body and the figure carving on the head, what makes this instrument a hardingfele is the four symathetic strings running through a channel in the neck. you can see the lower second tier on the bridge and the nut at the end of the neck where it is hollow. the fingerboard and bridge arches are also flatter than a violin's so it is easier to bow two or three strings at once to play chords.

this was not the first nor the last instrument i've built that needed a case made just to fit it. i really enjoy custom fitting cases to match the more unusual shaped instruments. i like to know they'll be safe when traveling.

this was the case the violin came in. i just extended and deepened the neck end and cut out some extra room for the bridge. then of course the pushin-up-daisies theme covering to hide the patchwork seams.