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Stewart Macdonald Tenor Ukulele Kit part 10 (Complete)

Finally completed, woot.

Whewww, I took over a year, but worth the time. Well, the actual time put working on the uke really was not that long. From my last post, I've been inundated with sickness, the holidays, more sicknesses, planning my baby's 1st bday, weddings, more birthdays and even more sicknesses.

Aside from peronal life stalling this project, I ran into trouble with the saddle. The saddle that came with the kit was way too slim for the saddle slot in the bridge. I ordered a new bone saddle off eBay from a seller in China and that took about two weeks to arrive. Then I screwed up that saddle too. I sanded it snug to fit the bridge slot, but when I decided to polish it, I sanded it a bit too much with the finer grits. The saddle was just a tad bit too slim where it would fall out of the bridge. So I had to order another saddle. I should've just ordered a bunch the first time around. The second saddle was a success.

When I strung up the uke for the first time, the wound C string had a lound twang to it. At first I thought crap, I screwed up on my uke. I was like oh well, my first uke, just gonna finish it off anyway. I continued on and setup the action. As I worked on the nut, the twang in the C string went away. I guess the slot in the nut was not cut right.

I used the strings with the kit only for the setup. I used a tip on a guitar setup site where you file down the top of the nut with the string still on so that you get the right height for the top of the nut. Needless to say, you ruin the strings when you do that. I replaced them with GHS strings which looks like the same kind of strings included in the kit.

Okay enough of my chit chat, here are pictures of the completed uke. Finally after a year of patiently working on it when time permits.








And here is the obligatory C, Am, F, G7. Please excuse my playing as I am not very good at it.

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