Child's Guitar Conversion

My neighbor found an old child's 6 string guitar at a yard sale for $1. It's pretty beat up, but solid. I thought I'd try converting it into a six string uke.

I've stripped the hardware, finish, and cheap fingerboard and am doing the sanding and priming right now (It'll have an enamel finish). It will have 13 frets to the body with a 15" scale. The neck is 1 -3/8" at the nut widening to 1- 3/4" at the body joint, which surprisingly is a dovetail, though sloppy.

I've tried searching the web for a 6-string uke nut but to no avail. I'm not very good at making nuts from scratch. Can anyone point me to a source? I don't want to put a lot of $$ into this thing as it isn't really worth it. This is just for fun.

If you can glue a 1/8 inch extension to the fretboard you could install a zero fret. Then the "nut" becomes a simple spacer, so is much easier to make (your slots simply need to go below the top of the zero fret, the slot bottoms don't need to be shaped).

Forgot to add that a scrap of ply, sanded down to fretboard thickness and stained, would be perfect. Glue onto neck surface, cut fret slot at the join, probably glue the fret in with CA glue. The spacer can be quite soft plastic, or even wood.

I thought about that, as I use "0" frets in a lot of my builds, and I'm making a whole new fretboard anyway, but I really wanted to use a conventional nut on this one.

I don't think you'll find one for sale out there....you'll probably have to make it as its a total custom job to fit that neck. Good practice in nut making anyway

I use melamine chopsticks. Just cut to length, glue in place, sand down to convenient height. Cut slot locations with junior hacksaw and shape slot with edge of half round needle file.

Hey I use chopsticks too! I also slice them length ways for saddles. I try to keep the Chinese pattern for interest. Recently I have been using vintage dominoes from eBay (£12 as one was missing) but only for nuts as they lack length.

Max