Ngd

Yes, that's a dog bowl...

Birdseye Maple top, back and fingerboard. Sapele sides. Ash neck (or maybe maple, but I think it my be good ole English ash).

Dog bowl resonator, chrome tap (faucet) sprinklers for the 4 soundholes, 8 x chrome box corners, single coil pickup and top mounted volume control.

Bridge is Just-a-bit-of-Wood™

26" scale length

Strings are the A-D-G from a 6 string electric, tuned GDG

Custom made by Shane Wagstaff in Mansfield, UK (10 miles from me). The cost was £ 90 for the CBG + £ 25 for a custom case.

In colonial currency, that works out to about $ 144 and $ 40

Woot Woot ..... Come On You Stags..

A very handsome instrument. Bet she howls!

Update:

The neck is Beech.

In terms of the sound, imagine a V8 Nitrous Banjo on steroids.

Currently working on my version of Kashmir by Led Zeppelin.

Now three strings

You could make it into electric Balalaika if you tuned EEA...and the chords are the E and A strinf fingering of Uke chords ...except you double up for the E strings....and you fret....with ......your thumb .....second thoughts ....leave it as is and slide that thing ............sound bite !?!

Very cool BigK! Sound sample please mate!

How very cool! I'd love to hear it!

You have reawakened my need to make a ukulele out of a stainless steel bedpan.

Very nice CBG. Resonators are one of my weaknesses. CBG's are what brought be eventually to the ukulele. In fact I have a dog bowl resonator 4 string and a CBU (cigar box ukulele) in the works.

I read that the KonaBlaster electric uke body shape was designed by tracing around a canned-ham tin and I thought, "Skip the middleman. Use a ham tin as a resonating body." When we finish our long road trip and return home in a month, I'm thinking of buying a cheap WalMart uke (maybe The Littlest Mermaid version), removing its neck, and bolting that onto the tin. I'll try to save the tin's lid to use as a resonator back. Has anyone tried anything like that?

http://www.cigarboxnation.com/

Do a search for "can uke" etc. Quite a few designs that you could modify to fit your purposes. IMO, making your own neck and fingerboard, and fretting it, whilst satisfying, is probably 99% of the work, so using a donor uke for the neck as you intend to do, would be my choice.

Good luck

Of course, you could always make a diddley bow to start. As soon as I get my garage tidied, I'm setting up a workbench for making "roots instruments". I love the idea of making music with junk. Kamoa owners have been doing it for years.

It gets even better if I search for HAM CAN UKE. And I'll admit that my interest, talent, skills, and tools for carefully shaping necks all approach zero. Building dulcimer fingerboards, even hollow ones, is one thing. Nice wood butchery is something else. So, except for dulcimer-based axes I have in mind, I'll be scavenging and repurposing existing necks.

Easy way to build a hollow dulcimer-style fingerboard: Obtain two or three cheap wooden yardsticks. Split one in half lengthwise. Use those halves as sides; glue a complete yardstick onto them, with the sides glued to the dulcimer body. For a lute's hollow neck, glue the bottom of the sides to the third yardstick. It couldn't hurt to glue small quarter-rounds at the inside joins. Now smooth the edges. Voila! The inside of that hollow neck is a good place to hide sympathetic strings for a dulcimer d'amore effect.

But wait! Isn't a yard rather too long for a dulcimer? Not at all. Make it a double-header; place the bridge in the middle, right at the half-yard (18-inch) mark. I suppose it could be mounted centered on a roundish tin can for resonance. Arrange the 4 strings as usual: low and tenor drones, then the paired soprano melody strings. Spin the instrument to play from either side as desired. The unplucked half-strings will add to the sympathetic resonance. It should have a full-bodied sound.

But that hollow neck and tin-can resonator might not be loud enough. So, instead of a roundish tin can, mount the neck on a banjo head -- no that costs too much, use a thrift-shop tambourine or bongo. Set the hollow neck just off the resonating head and put a flying bridge just over that neck with the bridge's feet on the head. The structure would be like #==O==# where '#' are the tuning heads, one for plucked strings, one for the sympathetic interiors. Easy, huh?

Then there's my idea for a triple-neck banjo-uke... but I should stop now.

Rarely has a post been more in need of a "like" button

The Big Kahuna said:

Rarely has a post been more in need of a "like" button

Click to expand...

Thank you, thank you. [/me buffs nails on lapel] But maybe UU management doesn't want us to like each other too much. Spoilsports.

Okay, on to the 3-neck banjo-uke. All scavenged necks, of course, radiating out from the drum like rays. The trick, to keep the strings from fouling each other, will be to fab a long, wide tailpiece reaching across the head. (Yes, this requires a big drumhead, maybe a foot-wide tambourine. I'll do the math after I get home and measure things.) Each neck's bridge is on the sweet spot near the neck instead of across the head. The tunings would be 1) gCEA (standard, with ringing hi-G), 2) GcEA (low-G, hi-C), and 3) GDAE (fifths, like a tenor banjo).

That grew from an idea for a non-banjo 3-neck uke. I have an oversized soft briefcase that can't *quite* hold two soprano ukes. Solution: a rectangular body with 2 or 3 necks attached in parallel with the tunings mentioned above. I'll measure things when I get home in a month and figure if it's really feasible. Since I like to re-purpose stuff, I'll see if an old rectangular zither or cookie tin will serve as the body. If I can put this together, I'll have a nice axe for working various fingerings. I can dream...

Looks great BigK! Did you build it yourself? Love to hear it if you've got a sound sample.

Also, you guys might want to check out this site:

http://junkyardluthiers.com/JunkyardLuthiers_Home_Page.php

Maybe some inspiration is to be found there...

I had it made for me, to my own spec. I'll be making them myself at some point though.

Booli said:

Also, you guys might want to check out this site:

http://junkyardluthiers.com/JunkyardLuthiers_Home_Page.php

Maybe some inspiration is to be found there...

Click to expand...

Wow! Lots of inspiration there! Thanks! Meanwhile, here in Santa Fe NM at Candyman Strings & Things is an electrified oil-can guitar with a Strat neck. Only US$600. I think I can find a cheaper oli can somewhere, and I know there's an old Tele neck out in the storage shed back home. Damn, do much inspiration, so little time...