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john
What size ukes are you building with redwood tops and what do you usually thickness them to? I have built two so far, one tenoe and one baritone. I haven't quite finished the baritone but my wife loves the tenor. She has her choice of several but it is her favorite.
Bob

The ukes are a concert (LS redwood over figured Mahogany 14 fret) top
would be about .075 with two very light fan braces.

The second is a Madagascar rosewood flamed redwood soprano where the
top is about .065 (one of, if not the, best sounding uke I've ever made imo)

The last is an LS Redwood over african blackwood Tenor with purpleheart
binding top was about .080 thick with three light fan braces. Also a really
great sounding one.

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John Mayes
http://www.mayesluthier.com

[QUOTE=Don Williams] Wow, John Mayes, you build some great instruments
there friend. I really like your work.
[/QUOTE]

Thanks Don. The feelings mutual...gotta love the smiley face uke!

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John Mayes
http://www.mayesluthier.com

Real nice Ukes John....

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Peter M.
Cornerstone Guitars
http://www.cornerstoneukes.com

Nice Ukes John!

When I finally finish the two I am working on I wanna try a redwood one

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Zac

Anchorage Alaska

Finshed my 1st! See #1 here

What Mark said: it's all over the map, although the two LS tops I've got are practically identical.

Ken Parker gave a talk at our shop many moons ago, and spoke of using redwood in the early 'Fly' guitars. He said it was either very good, or terrible, and there was no telling until you got the thing together. When it was bad even the CF shell wouldn't keep it from moving around.

I think that the built-in stress in those enormous trees must be at least part of the problem. I've noted that bad pieces of redwood will exhibit 'brash fracture': breaking cleanly across the grain when bent with a surface that almost looks as if it had been sawed. This is characteristic of wood that has stress induced microfracturing: essentially the weight of the tree and the internal stress have crushed the cell structure.

Most of the redwood I've measured has been rather dense, with high long-grain stiffness to match. I suspcet that's not so true of the curly stuff. It does have very low splitting resistance when bent across the grain, although, again, probably the curly stock is better in that regard. A property that seems to go along with that splittyness is the typically low damping: some redwood pieces 'ring' as long as a good piece of rosewood when tapped, and I suspect that is one of the things that gives it the 'rich' tone. Because of the splitty nature of it, I like to use a wider bridge to reduce the peak stress along the back edge.

More than most top woods, I think you have to work to the piece with redwood. In this respect there is no substitute for some program of measurements, although I'd be leary of a deflection test that used a lot of weight.

I got a bunch of redwood years ago, and resawed it. Some of those tops simply split sitting on the shelf. Since I didn't pay much for it, I was glad: better there than after I'd built the guitar. I'd suggest holding on to any redwood you might get for a while, just to see if it has any bad tendancies.

I will say that one of my favorite combinations for a classical guitar is redwood and mahogany, and I'd bet it's terrific with walnut, too.

Yeowzaa! Now that's a fine looking uke John!

Warmest regards,
Terence