Sycamore and Shamel Ash
Concert
For Sale at Hale Ukulele in San Diego, CA
Sold
Click on pictures to enlarge.
We will call this uke "Street Tree Revival". This ukulele is almost entirely made of materials harvested from the streets and yards of neighborhoods in Southern California. The parts that are not from urban areas are the Amazon Rosewood fretboard and bridge and the scrap wood mosaic rosette.
The top is made of Shamel Ash (aka Evergreen ash), a tropical ash from Mexico that is used for landscaping in So. Cal. This piece has a little bit of curl to it.
The Taylor Guitar company has started to use this wood for backs and sides, calling it similar in sound to the "old mahogany".
I figured that if it sounded like mahogany, it should work as a soundboard as well. I guessed right. It has a nice clear sound that projects very well.
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The accent woods are black walnut sapwood that has a little figure. The neck is Shamel Ash with a carbon bar for reinforcement.
The fingerboard and bridge are an interesting piece of Amazon rosewood that has a stripe of sapwood in it that I think goes well with the rosette.
The rosette is a mosaic of scrap woods that I picked up at a local wood working store. Clockwise from the fingerboard they are: mahogany, bloodwood, Bocote, canary wood, Purple Heart, myrtle, bloodwood, and walnut.
The back and sides are California Sycamore. The combination of dots and dashes is quite dramatic and there is a little bit of spalt that gives it a gray tone in some spots. Sycamore only has these markings when it is quarter sawn. If it is not quarter sawn it not only doesn't have the same figure, the wood tends to move a bit.
As always this uke has a sound side port that allows the player to hear the same sound as the audience.
The sides have and interesting transition from dashes to dots.
