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Permalink Reply by Don Thompson on December 5, 2010 at 3:51pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1BiPbxX1YU&feature=related
David, This vid was the inspiration for my short scale instruments. Awesome homemade guitar. Notice the guitar is capoed at the fifth fret as I described earlier on? I thought well heck, just shorten the scale then. Guitars like the Traveler are trying to be as short as possible hence the body mounted tuners.

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Permalink Reply by Mungo Park on December 5, 2010 at 3:53pm

A very intersting/imformative thread. I am finding you cant put guitar strings on small scaled CBG's the guitar strings are not made for short scales, the higher/thinner the string the tighter it has to be to produce the same note and them the tight string overpowers the rest in voluem. I guess the uke strings are made for the shorter scale Cheers Ron.

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Permalink Reply by ChickenboneJohn on December 5, 2010 at 9:46pm

The shortest I've built a guitar for standard tuning is 21 inch scale, and this needs pretty heavy strings. Any shorter than this and the string gauges get very heavy - there's an optimium tension for strings, and if you are well under this you may run into intonation problems. Making a short scale guitar and tuning it higher (as if using a capo) isn't too much of a problem.

Using piano wire seems like a bad idea - why use piano wire? Guitar strings are available in a wide range of gauges and they are cheap. Plain piano wire will be awful to string up with, especially anything over a 025 gauge, as it just won't want to bend round the machineheads and conform to the bridge (a wound string of the same gauge will have a much skinnier core).

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Permalink Reply by Johnny Debit on December 6, 2010 at 6:21am

Don:
Thanks for posting this. I've been kicking around a concept for a solid bodied, travel sized, tenor ukulele for a while now. My idea is very simular to this, but with a 17" scale and a total instrument length of 20". My goal is to also incorporate an onboard headphone amp with eq and a compressor. The challenge is figuring out where to fit everything.

Don Thompson said:

http://ukulelereview.com/2008/11/15/risa-uke-solid-ukulele-review/

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