If you’re stuck at home and can’t take a vacation, and if you have some spare time and some LEGOs lying around and you’re musically inclined, why not build a ukelele out of them like one guy did?
Ross Crawford decided to do just that, build an awesome blocky ukelele that actually sounds decent and even lets him strung along to “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
He says the most difficult part was the shape. “In case you didn’t realise,” he said, “LEGO bricks are kinda blocky, full of right angles. Great for buildings, not so great for ukuleles.” Crawford used lots of 1×1 and 1×4 bricks to actually make the ukelele body.
It also had to be strong enough to support the tension of the strings. “This model has to be able to withstand the tension of 4 fairly tight strings without exploding. I ended up using a pre-stressed Technic rod up the middle of the neck, which allowed the head to be securely attached to the body, and it works really well.”
Of course, any stringed instrument has to be tuned. “I had to come up with a way of tuning the strings, that was able to take the tension without slipping, and didn’t look too yucky.” The LEGOworm screws are supposedly wound the “wrong” way, but I’m not really a guitar or ukelele player, so I’ll take him at face value, though guitarists (or rather ukelelists) are free to complain in the comments.
For those of you who actually are musicians, the tuning is C-F-A-D, where normal ukelele tuning is G-C-E-A. This is still a very clever hack. The Internet is built on ukeleles and Legos. We’ve got loads of posts on LEGOs, since we’re a geek culture blog. There’s 16 Epic Lego weapons, for example. For South Park fans out there, there’s the LEGO Kenny McCormick. We also covered a homemade guitar that not only has everything but the kitchen sink, but actually is a kitchen sink.
Via: Gizmodo/Brothers Brick
