English yew as tonewood

[ProfChris]

I've just finished this soprano uke, which has an English yew top.

Yew Top 1890s (front).JPG (85.66 KiB) Viewed 5927 times

You Antipodeans have such a great range of good-looking tonewoods that I'm very jealous - yew and walnut are about all we have in the UK, appearance-wise.

The problem with yew is finding large pieces. This top is only 140mm across the lower bout, but I still had to make a four-piece top!

Yew Top 1890s (top).JPG (82.6 KiB) Viewed 5927 times

[Nick]

Certainly would have the resilience to stand up to string pull I would imagine, being the timber of choice for longbows , how does it sound & did you have to make any changes to the thickness over a 'standard' top?

[Mark McLean]

That certainly is a very elegant looking soundboard. Great colour and urique grain.
I can see why it is hard to get a decent sized board out of them - they seem to grow as a thousand trunks, even in the one tree.

giant-yew-tree.jpg (36.51 KiB) Viewed 5912 times

Nice uke!
cheers
Mark

[Allen]

I love the look of that one Chris. You must have done some interesting bracing around that sound hole to keep everything intact.

[ProfChris]

The top is a little under 2mm thick - I've gone down to about 1.5mm in this body shape for spruce and mahogany. My technique is to thin it until I get scared, flex the top, then thin it some more once I feel braver. At some point it feels "about right" and I stop. So around 1.8mm is where this one ended up. It's probably not of perfectly uniform thickness, as I worked it down with scrapers until it had what felt like uniform flexibility all over.

There is only a single transverse brace just below the soundhole (plus a bridge patch of course) - hope I haven't messed up here. My theory was that I'd managed a good hot hide glue joint at the waist, and the joints were so short that they were adequately supported by the waist, and the upper bout by the fretboard extension. The narrow waist makes the body very stiff longitudinally, and I'm trying to make my top bracing as minimalist as possible - the brace is spruce, and about 4mm wide x 6mm high, tapering to a peak. After all, there are plenty of 50-year old soprano ukes with no bracing at all, and the pull of four nylon strings on a 13.5 inch scale is quite low.

The shape is borrowed (loosely) from an 1890s Dias uke, and I've been playing with it for the last few months. I have a family portrait here:

1890s family group.JPG (80.99 KiB) Viewed 5887 times

L to R:

Spruce top (grand piano soundboard), mahogany back and sides (old shelf), mahogany neck (wardrobe).

Yew top (woodturning block, actually paid for!), mahogany back and sides as above, Spanish cedar neck (also paid for)

Mahogany (shelf back and sides, wardrobe neck, and the stripe is the ply used in the wardrobe - over 50 years old and suffered heat and damp without delaminating, so I felt confident using it).

I recorded this tonight, though it damps down the sound differences - first the mahogany, then the yew.

http://www.box.net/shared/76vpfo2bcopdi8q5f0b6

This is the yew top in action:

http://www.box.net/shared/94knefde4anr4fi30912