DIY Ukulele: The Ebay DIY Uke kit

From the moment I learned that i could make my guitar feel better to play by doing a setup, I was hooked on working on instruments. First I learned to do basic setups, then I learned to do fretwork, nut-work, (I repaired a violin for my wife in there at one point,) and from there I quickly became interested in actually building guitars. I don't have access to the tools that would be needed to build a guitar from scratch. But luckily cheap DIY guitar kits are plentiful, so it didn’t take long for me to decide that I am eventually going to build some kit guitars. 

I resisted the temptation to buy the nicer, more expensive kits that I had my eye on, and instead established a plan for myself to work my way up to being able to build a nice kit guitar. The hard part was trying to figure out the early steps to take, the least expensive kit guitar on ebay is still $70. On a whim I looked up ukulele diy kit, and lo and behold, a $17 kit uke with free shipping. I pulled the trigger immediately. Mind you, I’ve never played a ukulele. I had thought about getting one and learning to play, because I could fit it in my pack when I go to the field with my unit, and amuse the platoon with tunes. But I never got around to it. This seemed like a great opportunity to get a really cheap ukulele, and practice some building and finishing techniques on a small scale before moving on to a guitar kit. 

The package came free shipping from China. The free part is cool, but it does mean that it took three weeks to arrive, which was fine. I was working on my First Act ME501 during that time. The package actually arrived the same day I finished the ME501, a nice compact box. 

Here’s what was inside. I really couldn’t tell you what wood the body and neck are made of. They are very light, so I would guess basswood or something cheap of that nature. The body wasn’t bad, it needed some sanding around the edges of the top and bottom. The neck was pretty rough. The machine that cut it out left some raggedy edges, the headstock shape was uneven, the whole thing needed a lot of sanding, and really I should have filled the grain. The neck fit to the body workable. 

There was a plastic tailpiece and bridge, and a plastic nut. Both are pretty cheap, but workable. I know nothing about ukulele strings, but the strings the kit came with seem extremely cheap. I am debating if I will replace them or try to use them. The fretboard is plastic, with the frets molded in and painted gold on top. Thats about as cheap as it can get. Probably the high point of the whole kit is the tuners. They are simple open gear tuners, but they are solid. They are nice and tight, nothing loose, honestly much better than what I expected. I seriously doubt that I’ll have tuning issues with them. The downside is the plastic bushings were not the same size as the holes in the headstock. 

Worth noting is that this kit did not come with any sort of instructions. I know enough about working on instruments that I know what to do. But someone with no experience might have trouble. 

First I glued the neck to the body. Simple process. The peg on the neck that went into the body was a tight fit, so I didn't even need to clamp the neck. 

I sanded the body and neck thoroughly, and started experimenting with stains. I used some acrylic paint I already had to do this black base on the top, which I sanded back to try and get the grain to pop more. I didn’t really like how the acrylic base dye worked. So I got some watercolor inks from hobby lobby for the color stain. 

I started applying it in multiple coats, a light aqua blue first. Then I started darkening the blue, and working my way out from the middle of the top, trying to go for a sort of burst finish. 

About midway through staining I measured the scale length, and marked the location for the bridge and nut. The neck length was a little weird, so the 12th fret ended up past the edge of the body to leave room on the neck for the nut to position properly. 

After the bridge screw holes were marked I continued staining darker blue around the edges and the rest of the body and neck. 

When I felt satisfied with the stain, I used a sharpie to write my handle on the headstock, very improvised and shoddy looking, but I was ok with that. Then I glued the plastic fretboard to the neck. I decided to simply use gorilla super glue. That worked just fine, I am not in the slightest worried about the fretboard going anywhere. 

In this picture you can sort of see how my attempt to make a kind of blue burst finish ended up. Its decent, but not as good as I hoped. I also pre drilled the holes for the bridge screws. 

With the glue dry I taped off the fretboard, stuffed the sound hole, and started spraying clear-coat. Now, the sensible thing to do would have been to use an oil, like tru oil. But remember this is practice for doing a guitar, and I really prefer the idea of lacquer finish on guitars. I used Rustoleum specialty laquer, which has a quick dry and re-coat time. I sprayed a dozen or so coats over three days. I learned a lot of lessons from this experience. First, the neck was made of a rather porus wood. No matter how much I sanded it before hand, it had a lot of texture, especially since it sucked up the first few coats of laquer, which actually raised the grain even more all across the neck and body. I sanded the first couple coats back, but I still paid for this mistake later. In the future, a grain filler and sanding sealer are definitely necessary to get a smooth finish. 

Once the final coat was dry I proceeded to wetsand using 500, 1000, 1200, and 2000 grit, to remove the orange peel texture in the laquer. 

Then I hand buffed it with a fine car polish. Unfortunately, at this stage my mistakes added up. In addition to not filling the grain, I really didn’t get the lacquer thick enough, especially on the edges. So in many places in an effort to get the laquer smooth, I sanded through the finish to the wood, particularly the corners of the body. I don’t know if I did it wrong, or if I needed a finer polishing compound, but even the spaces where I did get a nice smooth laquer, It still didn’t polish to a high gloss, more matte. 

Once I was done with the finish, I screwed the bridge down and put in the bushings for the tuners. These plastic bushings were terrible. I actually had to ream out the top of the tuner holes to fit them, and even then they didn’t stay in the holes. So I actually superglued them in place. 

Tuning machines installed easy. 

The last step was putting on the nut and stringing it up. I strung it up without gluing the nut down first to make sure the nut was the right size and hight. It was actually just fine, so I used a couple drops of Elmer’s school glue to glue it down with no modifications. Stringing turned into a nightmare, I had no idea what I was doing, even after watching a tutorial video. I wound up doing everything twice before I got the strings tight enough on the bridge to where i could actually tune it. 

The finished product. I can’t say much about how it plays or sounds, because I know nothing about ukuleles. It took five minutes to learn a few chords and start playing though, its much simpler than guitar. So how do i feel about the finished product? Well, It did not turn out like I was aiming for, but I am ok with how it did turn out. I had intended for more vibrant color, but I really like how the colors ended up. I had intended for a perfect, high shine guitar finish. But I really like the distressed, worn appearance semi-gloss I ended up with. Most importantly, I learned a lot of lessons about finishing. How to sand, stain, and clear coat. Honestly, even if I had known what I was doing 100%, I doubt I could have achieved my original lofty goals. The quality of the wood on this kit was just too low. 

So in conclusion, this was a fun project. I made it more complex than it needed to be by experimenting with stains and clear finish, if you wanted you could just paint it by hand with almost anything, or with spray paints, or leave it bare wood and it would work just as well. The only tools needed are some wood glue, super glue, and a screw driver. I do recommend a drill and tiny bit to pre drill the screw holes. You might need a drill bit of the correct size, or a reamer to make the plastic bushings for the tuners work. This would be a great craft project for a children and parents. For $17 you end up with a working instrument that you made yourself.

x

ME501: Making a Ruined First Act into a Decent Guitar

To anyone who does happen to read this, welcome to my guitar project journal. I am doing this largely for my own benefit, but I know when I started doing this type of thing I searched for any videos or articles by people doing similar work. So I figured I would share my work for others to maybe learn from. Or hey, give me advice how to do things better. 

This project was done entirely using very simple, affordable tools from a regular hardware store. Perhaps $30-40 worth of tools, most of them things that many people already have, like screwdrivers and allen wrenches. I have a very small budget to work with, so I find the most affordable ways of doing things. 

This is a First Act ME501 that I picked up one night in a quick facebook marketplace deal. I am fairly new to DIY work on guitars, and I was looking for a cheap candidate to practice on. First Act guitars are cheaply made, I figured any one I grabbed would at a minimum need fretwork, making it a good choice for a practice dummy. The seller was only asking $30 with a decent fender gig bag and a strap, so I grabbed it. At that price with those accessories, there's no way to loose. Known issues were a broken 3 way switch and a missing volume knob, no big deal. A quick examination once I got the guitar home indicated that there were deeper issues as well. It had a lot of fret buzz in spite of a very high action. My original plan was to completely dismantle the guitar, re-finish the body, do a fret level and dress on the neck, and re-assemble it with a new 3 way switch and new tone and volume knobs. 

A shot of the back during dismantling. I kind of like the heavy brass string holder. The back of the guitar was covered in black grime. 

Once the guitar was completely dismantled I decided to clean up the body. 

I was able to get all the grime off, and the body ended up looking pretty good. I decided not to try to re-finish it. My one previous re-finish attempt did not go well, and this body, while nothing special, did look nice. I kind of like the very subtle cherry cream burst. 

This is where the good news ended however. I knew I was taking a chance getting an old First Act. When I went to level the frets I quickly discovered that the neck was warped. It took some fiddling and examination to figure out exactly what was going on. Right about the 14th fret the neck had a little bit of front-bow. The previous owner had tightened the truss rod quite a bit in an attempt to straighten the neck, but the truss rod was unable to fix it, maybe because the warp was at the heel of the neck, where the wood is thickest. Instead, tightening the truss rod had induced a back-bow at the top of the neck near the headstock, which did not come out when I released the tension on the truss rod. Basically the neck was S shaped. At this point I accepted that this guitar might be pretty much a lost cause. But I decided there would be no harm in trying to fix it. 

I researched ways to fix warped necks, and everything I found either suggested throwing the guitar away, or used expensive luthiery tools. So based on the principles of the expensive fixes, I improvised my own attempt. I clamped the neck to a flat surface, with the truss rod completely loose, straightening out the warped spots against my counter. I applied heat with a heat gun for 15 minutes at a time two or three times, letting it cool between. Then I left it for 48 hours. 

This did successfully straighten out the back bow at the top of the neck, and restored some functionality to the truss rod, but it barely did anything to the front-bow at the thick heel of the neck. 

I played around with the neck for awhile, trying to figure out a way to salvage it, and decided to try something pretty unorthodox. I was able to get the neck quite straight from the 1st to the 13th fret. The neck bent sharply up at the 14th fret. So I decided to isolate and level 1-14. Here you see my improvised diy leveling beam, a high end 24” aluminum level that does a good job. I use 600 grit sandpaper because it removes fret material pretty slowly, and doesn’t leave deep tool marks. It does make the process take a bit longer. 

I put a stop on the neck to keep my beam from going past the 14th fret. Any further than that and the next fret would pop up the end of the level, which would over time cause the beam to take too much material from the 1st fret. The level of the first 14 frets went pretty well. There were a couple high frets, and three that were low, which took some time to level out. 

Next, my solution to the front-bow problem. My plan was to introduce an extremely aggressive fall-away from the 13th fret up, where the front-bow starts. I constructed the set up you see to allow me to attack only the upper 9 frets, while the length of my beam rested on the rest of the frets. The idea being that eventually, the fall away on the top frets would line up with the rest of the frets. So even though the neck is bowed, the fret tops would be basically level. After a few strokes I switched to 60grit sandpaper. I had way too much material to file off to be using the 600 grit. I wish I had taken a picture of the pile of metal dust that was left when I was finished. 

I ended up with this. With the fret tops marked for crowning you can see how flat the last few frets are. The last fret is paper thin, barely sticking up from the fretboard. I accepted when I undertook this, that I would essentially lose the last few frets. I even considered simply pulling them from the fret board, but decided to do the fall-away for looks, as well as the chance that at least some of them might be playable. 

I was not able to 100% remove the relief caused by the warped neck. But according to my leveling beam, only a fraction of a millimeter, a hair of relief remained with this fall away, like a sheet of paper compared to over a millimeter before. As I expected, I was not able to really crown the last few frets. The highest fret I got a decent crown on was 15. I was able to round over 16 and 17 a little bit, but above that the tops remained pretty flat, and I gouged up the fret board a bit trying to round them at all. I only protected the fretboard with masking tape (I covered the rest of it after this photo), and I crown completely by hand using a regular flat needle file. I only do this as a hobby on cheap guitars, so I have no good reason to buy expensive crowning tools. The downside of doing it by hand this way (besides taking longer) If I have to work on a spot for too long the edge of the file tends to wear through the tape and a little slip can hit the fretboard. I always wind up with a couple minor nicks, but trying to work on these flat frets I put some pretty decent scars in the fretboard. This is part of the reason I wanted cheap cheap First Act guitars to practice on, trying to get better at crowning by hand. But honestly, If I continue to use this method I may need to look into better ways to protect the fretboard. 

The fret ends were quite good. No sharp edges or fret sprout, so I didn't worry about dressing the edges. 

Once I got past the 15th fret, the rest of them crowned pretty easy, with only a couple of tiny scratches in the fretboard, which I was able to sand out. Once I finished rounding over the tops with my file, I used, 600, then 2000 grit sandpaper up and down the frets, and finished by polishing the frets and fretboard with 0000 steel wool. They sure looked pretty and gleaming, but it remained to be seen if the guitar would be playable. This is my third DIY fret job, and they do keep getting better. My first guitar, A New York Pro strat, saw some improvement, and I was able to lower the action. But it still suffers from some buzzy spots. My second guitar, an old Epiphone LP Junior, I got much more level. But I didn’t do a great job re-crowning its medium jumbo frets. Some of the tops are just barely rounded over, and once they get a little wear in them I’ll have to re-do the fret job. The crowns on these medium jumbo frets on the ME501 turned out quite well. 

The next step was to reassemble and re-wire the body. I cleaned the hardware and pickguard somewhere between doing the neck, and my replacement 3 way switch arriving. In the background you can see my computer with some of the pictures I took to help me remember the wiring. 

Since this is a First Act guitar I got for $30, I had no qualms about putting in the cheapest switch I could find, a $5 switch from guitarfetish.com. It works just fine. 

Electronics soldered back up, and hardware and tuners back in place. Ready for final assembly. 

Here it is pre strung up with 9s. The nut is not yet glued down. Now, I usually only string my guitars with 10s. I the heavier strings allow a slightly lower action, I like having some pushback on my bends, and I break fewer strings on bends with 10s. However, I noticed when I originally switched to 10s that the heavier strings put some front-bow on the necks of my guitars, and required some truss rod adjustment. This guitar already has front-bow issues, and I don't trust the truss rod. So I opted to put the lighter 9s on to hopefully avoid dealing with the neck issues. 

Once I got the strings on I was able to see that the nut action was dreadful, way high across all strings. Luckily since they were all equally high I could fix this by simply sanding down the bottom of the nut. I used 600 grit sandpaper on a hard flat surface (not the wood table) to remove a little material at a time. I checked it periodically by sitting the nut in place and tightening up just the two middle strings. You can see by the white plastic dust on the sandpaper how much material I had to remove. 

I then glued the nut in place and tuned all the strings. The low E and A strings were still just a tad bit high, so I used nut slotting files to get them where I wanted them. Once finished, the nut is not bad for a plastic nut. I had no trouble with strings binding up in it while I was tuning and de-tuning during the setup. 

With the action set at the nut I rolled into setting the action at the bridge. This was really the moment of truth for my work on the neck. To my surprise I was able to get the action almost as low as I use on my other guitars, with no buzzing. I honestly didn’t have high hopes after the trouble the neck had given me, but it turned out fine. Since I had previously removed all the bridge saddles to clean the bridge thoroughly, it took a little work to get the intonation set. The bridge is molded pot metal, but the fender style saddles made it easy to set action and intonation. 

The last thing I did was throw on a couple new knobs. A local guitar store carries a lot of basic parts, and I was able to get a pair of knobs that match the old ones almost perfectly, so I ended up with one extra knob. 

The final moment of truth was plugging it in and playing it. I am quite happy with how this guitar turned out. The neck is comfortable, and it plays pretty well and sounds great. The pickups are pretty good, very similar to my Epiphone LP Junior, which is my favorite guitar. Unlike the junior though, it has the neck pickup, which opens up some nice lead tones I didn't have before. It also sustains far more than my plywood body Junior. 

The most surprising thing I found is that I was able to play all the frets, including the ones I had flattened almost away. The intonation sounds a tiny bit off on the highest ones since I wasn't able to crown them right, and they are a little harder to play since they are so low to the fretboard, but they are playable. This could never be a shredder's guitar, but I can't shred anyway. It works just fine for my playing style.
I've only been playing it for a day, but already this guitar has found a spot in my heart. Its fun to play, sounds great, and has a cool aesthetic. It also has sounds that my other two guitars do not. I love restoring a forgotten instrument and giving it a home. 

So to sum up the cost and work done: $30 for the guitar, $5 switch, $5 knobs. I straightened some warp out of the neck, and leveled the frets out to compensate for the rest. Fixed the crappy nut, did a full setup, and I got a decent playing and sounding guitar for $40 total and a few hours of work. Its fair to say its not re-sellable, but thats ok because its a fun player, and I learned a lot from fixing it up. 

I don't think I could recommend a First Act flat out because of the issues this had. Even when it was new, before the neck warped, the nut action was still insanely high. The beginners and kids these are marketed towards would likely be discouraged from playing by how difficult and bad sounding the basic open chords would have been on this thing. The fact that it developed permanent neck warp after just a few years tells a tale of poor materials and build practices.

With that said, if you're willing to work on guitars and are ok with a challenge, you can turn a First Act like this into a decent guitar. Really, fretwork and setup are the biggest differences between a super cheap First Act, and a more expensive guitar. If you can do a fret level and crown, a fret edge dress, sand down the bottom, or file the slots on a nut, and set action and intonation at the bridge, you can make any cheap guitar feel and play like a more expensive instrument. 

The pickups are good, the hardware and electronics are passable, and this one has a cool unique shape with a nice finish. If you can pick one up in the $30 range I simply can't recommend a better way to learn to work on guitars. It's guaranteed to need some work, if you can't fix it you loose very little, and if you do fix it you can get a fun little guitar.