Matchbox ukulele

Well, here is the little mini-matchbox ukulele we made.

http://www.ukuleleunderground.com/forum/album.php?albumid=748&attachmentid=9598
http://www.ukuleleunderground.com/forum/album.php?albumid=748&attachmentid=9599
http://www.ukuleleunderground.com/forum/album.php?albumid=748&attachmentid=9600

The body is made of matches, or rather matchsticks, which are very likely spruce or fir. We glued them together using good old white wood glue. The neck is made of a spruce-sapeli-spruce sandwich with sapeli ears on the head. The fingerboard is a little piece of indian rosewood veneer with paper clip frets glued on. The nut is rosewood and the bridge is sapeli with a rosewood saddle and a little rosewood support bar in the back to hold the strings.

We carved the tuners out of little scraps of sapeli and fire hardened them, but I have the feeling they still are not quite stiff enough. It's not hard to tune and they stay in place, but there is a slight "give" in the rotation of the button before the peg actually turns.

We finally got the slots filed into the nut today. I went just a tad too deep and got a little buzz on the 1st and 4th strings so I had to take the first couple of frets down a little. We couldn't find files this small and didn't want to spend a lot of money on this project, so we just cut some grooves into a set of thickness gauges, and used two of them (0.50 and 0.80 mm) to file/saw the nut slots. It worked a charm, but like I said you have to be really careful when working at this scale - every stroke of 1 cm is like a pull of 10 cm at normal scale.

I don't know if this is the smallest ukulele ever, but I do think it ranks among the smallest. The tuning is an octave and a fifth above normal (C) ukulele tuning: D-G-B-e. And it sounds good too! The intonation is fine. Of course it's not easy to hit the frets with normal sized human fingers.

Anyway, I hope you like it...

Wow, that's small! Very cool. Now let the competition begin for the smallest in the world!.... This one's pretty small too!

Nicely done!
Although someone is likely to complain that they don't like the friction tuners <vbg>

AlanZ said:

Nicely done!
Although someone is likely to complain that they don't like the friction tuners <vbg>

Click to expand...

Yeah, and why no slotted headstock!

Alan...lol
Chuck...lol
Steiner....I'm holding out for the scepter model, besides I like the crown bridge better

Erich...awesome job, that thing is too cool. The hard part is waiting a month so you can buff it out

Now all you need is a gigbag, a itty-bitty clamp on tuner, and a eensy-teensy fedora...What a great starter kit that would be!!:shaka:

Now let's see Kala trump that. The best thing about it is that it is well made.

You've got mad skills, my friend!

Thanks for the comments everyone.

E-Lo, that vid has a fake soundtrack. Who knows what the little toy sounds like, but ous definitely plays real, authentic music.

Steiner, thanks for the link. Great little mini-uke, and I think it's smaller than ours.

Very nice! Great craftsmanship.

why's it not electric??? lol

you can run a piezo transducer to a 1/8 mini jack...just using an adapter to 1/4 inch. The size of the transducer doesnt matter, because you can cut them up and wire even the small pieces.

That has got to be one of the coolest things I've ever seen!

Cool idea with the piezo and mini jack, but I'm not sure how we would go about getting the pickup inside and the jack wired and mounted now that everything is finished... Maybe next time. We'll see what we get out of her with a piezo stuck to the back.

yeah, no way of taking her apart...it would definitely be another project, but it would be "winner winner, chicken dinner"