This tenor ukulele has an all Hawaiian Koa wood body--top, back, and sides. This is the most visually spectacular set of Koa I have built with. I special ordered the wood from a Koa wood supplier on the big island of Hawaii for a customer who wanted a truly one-of-a-kind instrument as a present for her husband.

This Koa has both spalt (the blotchy patches you can see in the sides and back) and extremely high flame (the feather-like colorations that run perpendicular to the wood’s grain).

The neck is mahogany. The headstock overlay, the bridge, the neck heel, and the inlay at the guitar’s bottom are ebony. The nut and saddle are bone. Binding is tortoise patterned celluloid. The sound hole rosette is paua abalone shell. The perfling trim around the ukulele’s top and beside the ebony insert at the base are white-black-white wood strips. I used Gotoh geared tuning machines with a 16:1 turning ratio.

The trout inlay is red and green abalone shell and yellow mother of pearl.

The finish is French polish, which is the only finish I do these days.

I’ve included photos of some of the steps in building this ukulele, which apart from differences in internal bracing and neck attachment, are similar to the steps in building a guitar.