Pocket ukulele - home made Sopranino Ukulele from scrap wood

How to make a Pocket sized home made Sopranino Ukulele from a plank taken from a shipping pallet.

First find a piece of straitish knot freeish wood about 3 and a half inches wide (90 mm) or more and half an inch thick or more and about 14 inches long or more. I got mine from a section of a plank taken from a shipping palette. A longer plank will give a longer ukulele. I have made a 2 foot long one (which is a Tenor Ukulele) using a virtually identical method and a standard soprano as well. 

You can see how they sound here

First is the sopranino tahitian style tuning (apologies for the fat fingers)
Second is a tenor Uke tahitian style tuning.
Third is a regular tuned soprano uke all made using roughly the same method.

Step 1: Mark out your Uke

Mark out the shape you want for your ukulele. I am going for as simple a shape as I can because I am a little simple myself.

The scale length here was going to be 20 cm but finished up being 22 cm,or around 8 and a half inches.

Comments

[marc.cryan]

What are the strings?

[titchtheclown]

20 lb fishing line on this, but feel free to experiment. The soprano in the video is currently strung with a combination of 40, 80, 60 and 40 lb line for GCEA tuning.

[DanYHKim]

This is wonderfully rough-and-ready. Your instrument is very accessible . . . even I think I could make one! This 'ible demonstrates many of the characteristics that make this site so very useful: the end result is kinda ugly, but works fine, the materials can be found cheap or free, and the steps are broken down into simple tasks that are easy to describe. Finally, the step that describes how to test the sound with one string anticipates a common point of failure. I am really impressed!

Oh, the pictures are great, and the video is really fun to watch.

[mr.incredible]

Video or audio would be nice. A router might be a better way of excavating the back. It would definitely allow you to make a more precise depth.

[titchtheclown]

dodgy video up
Will work on something better

[mdog93]

I am also interested in how this sounds; not particularly loud and fairly dull is my guess.. but I am not expert :p

[Robartcrafts]

every time I try to download a PDF it takes me to the login. so I login hit download PDF and it takes me back to login. I don't mind going around in circles when I'm on a merry-go-round but this is ridicules.
robartcrafts

[Aegian2424]

how does it sound? maybe upload a video?