Life is weird. Start thinking about something, um, like a ukulele and it is suddenly everywhere. I found this tiny toy at a local charity shop
It's 100% tourist tat. Made in china, sold in Hawaii for $27usd (more that I'm told my ukulele cost) in the 1990s.
She looks big, but don't be fooled. It's tiny next to my daily strummer.
It's 17 inch long which makes it a sopranissimo ukulele. But seriously, it was never meant to be played. The tuning pegs don't stay in place and someone stripped the screws that hold them in trying to tighten them. The wood is some sort of composite sawdust like they use for packing boards to protect stuff in transit. Like if MDF had a really poor little brother. This would be that. The sides might be made of wood wood like comes from a tree, but it's hard to tell. The neck also seems to be wood. And the strings are fishing line.
So far, I'm in this for $8CAD. My budget to fix this is two dollars more. I wonder if I can make it playable.
There is no possible way this is going to sound good. It's crappy wood substitute. It has paint almost as thick as the wood. But it might be a fun thing to keep in the hen house to play when I'm scaring away sky monsters that try to eat my chickens.
First the tuner peg thingies. These suck chicken shit they are so bad (I've never sucked chicken shit, but I imagine it is unpleasant). I cannot get them to hold enough tension on the fishing line to play a note, level on the correct note. These gotta go.
I found some for really really cheap so that the four tuning pegs come in at about $1.25 for all of them. It's an unpopular tuning peg style and I'm not convinced it's any better than a violin friction peg. But it is cheaper.
White ones are the old ones, the black is the new.
The white pegs were hard to remove as the screw holes are stripped. The cross is almost a circle. But someone saw this and suggested, almost a circle with four corners is almost a square. Robertson screwdriver to the rescue!
The new pegs don't need to be very tight at all to hold their place. We'll see when they are under tension, but I suspect they are going to be great!
Since I have the fishing line off one end, I might as well replace the strings on the bridge end.
hmm, these new strings seem pretty thick.
And I've never used a tie on bridge before. My ukulele uses the peg system like a violin so it's really easy. This seems to be knot-based. I'll just take one string off for now, and see if I can reproduce the knot without having to get the internet out.
Wow. Way easier than expected. About the same stress level as the peg bridge system.
And wow, these strings are white. It might look good on this toy ukulele.
Strings, made in china for made in china ukulele. These are usually on sale for about $0.50 to $1 cad for all four stings.
But wait
We got to go back in time to before I started taking this ukulele apart.
I measured the action (the distance between the top of the fret and bottom of strings). In an ideal world, the distance between fret 12 and the string would be 2.5mm (give or take, below 3mm seems to be normal). Mines about 5mm. The string should be almost kissing fret 1. Mine has two mm.
I'm too lazy to get a file to sand the groves properly. So I'm going to sand the bottom of both the nut and the (what is that thing called... not bridge... saddle!) saddle. To tell how far I sand, I make a mark parallel to where the bottom was when I started. I know I'll chicken out before I get far enough, but it is easier to sand more off later.
Neither of these were glued in place with enough glue. The strings hold them down so I'm going to keep with that tradition for a while. If by some miracle, I can get this ukulele working, I might make new ones out of bone as these are pretty much the same plastic they make credit cards out of and sanding was unpleasant.
You know what. This sand paper reminds me that I cut myself on the frets. I wonder how easy it is to sand that edge too.
It turns out the neck of the ukulele is extremely easy to sand and the frets are even easier to sand than the wood. It's a very soft metal. Could it be gold?!?
It was pretty easy to get this far. I thought it would take days.
I lie
I thought the thing would break and I would be pulling ukulele shrapnel out of my arm for a week.
The new tuning pegs stay just fine. Nothing slipping. I didn't tighten the screws all the way yet, and I don't think I'll need to.
The strings aren't fully tight yet. Just tight enough so they ring when plucked but not all the way tight. I want the ukulele to get used to having real strings on it before I try to tune it, so probably tomorrow I'll tune. Then it's two weeks of trying to get the strings to settle in so it keeps the tune for more than 30 seconds. But that's ukulele strings for you. Especially nylon.
I'm surprised how nice the sound is from just plucking out of tune strings. Could this become a playable instrument? Or is it just a prop for painting still life?
tiny ukulele won't hang from the hook right way up, it's so small
It didn't implode with string tension when i tuned it.
I can even play music on it. Not great music, but that's more a skill thing. The sound is pleasant and what I expected the $50 price range ukulele to sound like. The notes hang around for half a second or so after we pluck the strings. It's got a higher voice than my tenor.
Cheerful is the word that comes to mind. Like a kid hyper on sugar at a birthday party, but with a pleasant singing voice.
I think it would be fun when I learn George formby triple strum.
The tuning pegs....sigh.
How to describe this?
They stay exactly where I put them. No slipping or sliding. (Although the strings aren't settled in, I watched closely and the pegs are fine). In that way, they work amazingly well.
On the other hand...hmmm... you know how a circle has 360 degrees because math said so? I don't know if it is the short strings or because the tuning pegs don't have gears, but, but they are annoyingly sensitive. Two dgrees will take you from far too flat to far too sharp. Four degrees will take you to far too sharp on the next letter. It makes tuning painful as my hands don't do that small a movement.
If it was going to be more than a novelty instrument, I would upgrade to geared tuning pegs. This means drilling the hole bigger and somehow making the head big enough to fit the new mechanism. I don't think it sounds good enough for that.
intonation and set up
Filing the nut and the thing from the bridge (white things above) made a massive difference to how comfortable this ukulele is to play. Even with the tiny neck, not having to press down hard makes it easy to get clean notes.
I didn't expect set up would make this much difference. I didn't even go as far down as I should have. Instead, sticking to the maximum action (string to fret height) that is suggested.
The intonation, where the notes on the frets are what they claim to be, is almost spot on. The E string is a tiny bit sharp still, when on the 12th fret. But the others are nearly perfectly one octive higer. I think this is a big part of why I find the sound so pleased, the higer notes don't sound awkward.
I feel encouraged to try this setup on my tenor ukulele. Which, let's face it, is the entire reason I got this toy ukulele. To build courage and see if ukulele set up actually makes a difference. It does.
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