I wanted to show two of my pet projects to see if you guys find them interesting! I know most you guys are all about the hand made (which is awesome!) but I should warn you these involved some pre-made parts.

Full albums:

Uke: http://imgur.com/a/dwELB#0

Canjo?: http://imgur.com/a/0UKSF

For the guitar I bought a used maple electric guitar neck on ebay ($20!) and a bone bridge and nut kit. For the uke, I got an unfinished neck+tuningpegs+bridge kit from some Chinese manufacturer on eBay. If I could do it again, I’d do it by hand. The product that was shipped was chipped and not as advertised! I could have made a better product by hand.

I'm happy to answer any questions about the design and build if you have them but I'll try to summarize it too.

They both have similar designs. After watching a youtube documentary about the tin-can guitars people were making in South Africa, I couldn’t help myself. Most the can builds I’ve seen include a lot of wood inside the can. This pretty obviously hinders the vibration of the metal. It seems to work okay- especially with electric pick ups but I wanted something a little louder, brighter, and acoustic.

I’m a bit of a physics enthusiast (not sure how relevant that is) and wanted to minimize the dampening effect of wood as much as I could. Their were two forces that I thought would be strong enough to buckle the can- the front to back force on the bridge and the base to neck force of the strings.

The bottom to top force of the strings in both instruments was compensated for with a dowel (1in for the guitar, 5/8 in mahogany for the uke) that was inserted into the neck and attached to the base of the can.

The front to back force on the bridge was compensated by 2 mahogany sound posts inside the can on either side of the bridge for the guitar. The uke was a little different- I wanted to have enough tension to arch the top to take advantage of the f-holes (following the theory that on a curved top instrument, f holes allow for accentuation of both the high and low end of the register). For this I used a single piece of mahogany with a mostly flat bottom and a decently curved top.

Both bridges are “floating." They were purchased online but significantly trimmed down. The uke bridge had to be sanded to have the same curvature radius as the top of the can.

I made the tailpiece for the uke. I think the pictures describe it well enough! It’s attached to the screw that goes into the dowel by some picture hanging wire I also had around :).

That’s all I can think of at the moment… any questions or comments?