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1. Change the strings and condition the fretboard on my guitalele
2. Sand the bottom of the bridge to lower the action on my tenor uke. It didn’t bother me too much until I tried to play barre chords up the neck. X 12 12 17 absolutely kills my fingers.Well, I’ve successfully lowered the action on my tenor, and it makes a HUGE difference. I might lower it a bit more next time I change the strings, but it will do for now.
Nice work Robin!
I pay a luthier to do mine because I am not brave enough to attempt it myself.
I am really impressed.I have three (budget) ukes I need setups on to lower the action mostly at the nut and I’m so tempted to get some files from StewMac to try it myself. I don’t know of any luthiers in my area and it’s almost not worth paying the price of getting each done when the ukes themselves were fairly inexpensive, but I know it can also make a world of difference in the intonation. I started to explore fret recrowning/filing tools and it started to get kind of overwhelming, LoL.
Maybe someday, I’ll be brave enough to try it. I figured that even if I messed one up, it’s not much of loss. What I really want to do is take a workshop or learning course on how to do setups on your own instruments and there’s one I found in California but it was over 400 miles away. 😭
The action is on my top do list too but I’m scared. The music store says it’s finebut I think it could be a little lower on all my ukes. Good job for making it work!
I’ve always taken my ukes to a luthier for fret dressing and work on the nut. (Okay, I’ve only done that once.) I’ve only ever worked on the saddle. Even then, I took it down a tiny bit too much on one of my ukes so that it’s beautifully easy to play but I can’t really dig in to it when I’m playing without the strings slapping against the frets. I had that in the back of my mind when working on this one, so it’s still a little bit on the high side, but it kind of needs to be because the 11th fret protrudes a little bit and I don’t want to have to get a luthier to work on it (it would probably cost as much as the uke did in the first place).
Anyway, if anyone is thinking about attempting this, feel free to send me a message and I might be able to identify some potential pitfalls. Otherwise, make sure your frets are level before you go playing with the action too much and only take it down a little bit at a time. It’s okay if it takes a while to get it right.
Check out “Discuss Your Gear” => “Does anyone does ukulele setups, as some of this was discussed there.
I know I had my higher end uke’s nut work done by a luthier and it is good and I don’t want to touch it. On my medium grade uke I wasn’t afraid to give it a try and got good results.
-Ron@kanae926 – I oiled the fretboard and changed the strings on the guitalele. Does this look better?
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