erich@muttcrew.net
Well-known member
Well, here is the little mini-matchbox ukulele we made.
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...
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...
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