Monthly Archives: August 2013

I've started on the carved multi-uke hanger I mentioned a little while back. I found a nice wide mahogany board, printed out my pattern and used spray adhesive to stick it down. Then I started carving the first flower and leaf. I've got a lot to learn, but this project seems totally doable. It will take a while, but it's sort of a relaxing activity. I'm in no rush to finish it, so I'm just going to chip away at it as the mood strikes.

I've been waiting for the lacquer to cure on the cherry soprano uke before I can finish it up. While I've been waiting, I started working on something I saw in a recent issue of Make magazine - a banjolele. It's a cross between a ukuelele and a banjo, as you might have guessed. It is essentially a ukulele with a metal resonator rather than a wooden body. It was super quick to build - only took a half-dozen hours on a weekend - and is pretty fun to play. I figure the whole thing cost me maybe $30, and it sounds surprisingly good too. There is no proper fretboard - the frets are just laid right into the neck itself (which is some leftover quartersawn cherry I had lying around). The resonator is just a pair of aluminum cake pans!

Now that I've been finishing some of the new ukuleles - and I've got plans to build a couple more - I need to come up with a wall hanger that can hold more than one uke. I've seen a few online, but for the most part they are pretty boring - just a long board with multiple hanger hooks screwed into it. I had this idea to do a bunch of Hawaiian flowers in a sort of flowing, irregular blob-ish shape, and relief carve them into one 4-5 foot board and then add four or so hangers to that. I've always wanted to give relief carving a try, so I figured here was a decent excuse. Below is the pattern I put together in Photoshop. I've ordered my tools already. I'm going to try and post pics as the project progresses, so you can see the process as I go. This will be my first time - so I suspect I will do some things that aren't quite the normal way to do it, but it should be a lot of fun!