I made this: Ukulele guitar thing!

I've been piecing this guitar together for about a year now and finally assembled the whole thing. I made one a few years earlier from a cigar box, but felt the ambition to actually make a box this time. It's just some thin plywood with little square dowels at the corners; the neck is a stick of 1 inch stock.

The fretboard is another one-inch piece that's maybe a quarter inch deep, glued on top of the neck. I put in the frets by hand, using a coping saw to make narrow little slits for the fret-wire. I used my existing baritone ukulele as the template to get the spacing of the frets right. I wanted a sort of back-woods old-school handmade feel, but couldn't pass up a few modern accessories like real fretwire, a bridge, and tuning pegs which I bought from Stewart-Mac online. Those parts cost a total of maybe 50 bucks, but I bought enough to make another if I get so inspired.

Here's my favorite hack: the bridge had pre-drilled holes, but they were too wide for my fretboard. So after much worry and brainstorming, I shoved in two eyelet screws and threaded in a decking screw to hold the strings in place. Hack-o-licious.








And yes, it plays, and is reasonably in tune - it sounds about equal to my skill level - folky and proudly amateur. It's even electric. I glued a piezo buzzer (3 bucks at Radio Shack) near the soundhole as a pick-up and wired it in to a jack near the back. I'm going to you-tube a demo soon.