Cigar Box Ukulele build.

Last Saturday while out in town shopping with my wife I popped into an old fashioned tobacconists, (old fashioned in the truest sense because the shop is in a building that looks like came straight out of a Dickens novel) this was just a bit out of character for a life long non smoker so what was I up to? Well you could have guessed it was something to do with my latest instrument build. I was after empty cigar boxes as I want to build a cigar box ukulele! These instrument sem to have become a bit of a craze and there are lots of sites related to them not in the least the social network site Cigar Box Nation http://www.cigarboxnation.com/

I asked if she sold them off as I had read on a blog that £1 was about the going rate but she said no we give them away but only have one at the moment and presented me with a nice ply box with nicely finger jointed corners. A plain bu other wise pretty box except it had a sticker on the back with a distressing photo of a central American guy with a huge ugly red seeping growth on his throat with the caption SMOKING CAN LEAD TO SLOW AND PAINFIL DEATH. Not the most attractive thing to have adorning your musical instrument! So I removed that though I might keep the standard Smoking Kills sticker. So with the body of the uke taken care of all I need is a neck, I have a piece of teak that I found in a rock pool on the beach, my banjo guitar has some of it as the fingerboard already and I am hoping it will make a good one piece neck, teak would be far too heavy on a guitar but as this is such a small instrument I’m hoping it will just make it feel a bit more substantial and not make it too neck heavy. I can always glue a bock into the back of the box to balance it if it is. I’m going to make it into a tenor size uke (17” scale length)as Victoria Vox’s always sounds nice and it should be a little less cramped to play than either a soprano (13”) or concert (15”) size

Cigar box Uke blog part 2

The Ukulele neck is coming on well and as you can see I've attached some extension blocks to the headstock area to make it wide enough and am gluing together a couple of maple off cuts and strip of rosewood to make a nice laminate which will be glued on top for the headstock facing.