Repairing My DIY Travel Uke

If you’re just catching up, check out the list of posts below for the full build log plus a short clip of me playing the ukulele.

I’ve gotten a lot of use out of my travel ukulele, but it’s need a little TLC now and then. Most recently, I found myself in that classic DIY scenario…

It started when I looked down at my uke months ago to discovery one of the frets I had superglued in place had come out! Fortunately, I found it nearby and found I could temporarily push it back into the channel that was formed by the hardened glue. Of course, it could still slip right back out – which is what happened in the first place. I went to the age-old tactic of “just living with it” for the time being. I’d slide the fret in, play for however long, slide it out and kept it somewhere safe.

As this was clearly not a long term fix, I finally removed the pin, loosened and removed the strings from the tuning pegs, wrapped them back behind the neck, cleared an area, superglued it back in place, and “clamped” it down using rubber bands and popsicle sticks. Don’t laugh. It worked the first time on all the frets and only failed on 1/15 of them after two years.

This, of course, is where the problems began. I discovered the Graph Tech Ratio Tuners I had installed, which looked great, had developed cracks near where the screws held them in place on two tuners. This crack essentially caused the insides of the gears to become misaligned to the point they wouldn’t turn. A third tuner didn’t have any visible defects – but it would only had about 180 degrees of tuning range – nowhere near enough to wind strings, let alone fine tune the strings. Now, seeing as how these plastic geared tuners failed after two years when all I did was unwind them once to fix the missing fret, I wasn’t going to get another set of the same thing.

Now, I still had the tuners I’d bought at the recommendation of my buddy and maker–extraordinaire, Matt Stultz. After all, the original holes I’d drilled in my uke were designed for these anyhow. I had only gone with the Graph Tech’s due to the color and low-profile setup, so that the tuners wouldn’t rise above the strumming area. After getting these out – I discovered the rubber grips for the tuners had taken on an almost… sticky / gooey quality. I measured them up and 3D printed some slightly smaller ones that had a kinda cool “torpedo” look to them.

In case someone is reading this blog post WAY in the future, about six months ago a post went viral on the 3D printing sub-reddit due to some random woman’s white hot rage at seeing someone having repaired their stove knob with a 3D printed replacement.

ANYHOW, I printed a few test versions of these tuning knobs and replaced the wider sticker versions with sleek non-sticky 3D printed versions. Once these were installed1 2 I started to restring the uke and discovered one of the 3D printed bridge holders was cracked. The turn around was also cracked, but still working well enough.

Now the uke has these new / original tuners I’d purchased and the turning of their little metal gears brings me joy. They don’t stick out to the side too much and, installed at an angle, they don’t rise very much above the playing area.

Now I just need to learn to play it! I’m just kidding – I can play it, I just need to practice more often. :)

DIY Travel Soprano Ukulele

Installed again? Re-installed? I test fit and installed them originally and then pulled them out in favor of the Graph Tech’s, so I perhaps they weren’t actually installed originally? [↩]
I digress. [↩]