This project was my last project of my freshman year. This year had been amazing and I learned many things. For this project, we were given around three weeks to take one of our previous project and do it better. Since I really love music and wanted to give another try on making ukulele, Olivia, Shasta, Hana, and I decided to make our Ukulele better. Problems from Last Ukulele: • Used shoes box for the body(the sound didn't resonate) • Head to neck broke, so we hot glued (not stable) • Sound hole too big • Hot glue wasn't strong enough to hold strings down for the bridge • Uncomfortable to hold • Head and Neck straight (not angled): the string didn't stay still in position • Heavy Problems solved: • Used balsa wood for the body(Resonates really well) • Carved the head and neck out of one block of wood (very stable) • Small sound hole • Screwed the bridge on the body (could hold strings down) • Very comfortable to hold and play • Angled the head more backwards for the strings to have tension and stay on the nut • Light and easy to carry around
Reflection: It was really fun rebuilding our ukulele. Since we knew what we needed to fix and be careful, it was very easy for us to make it better. One of our peaks is that we accomplished our goal to "make our Ukulele better". Like I mentioned above, the sound resonates really well, it's very stable, light, and easy to play and carry. I compared the sound with my own ukulele that I bought at the store, the one we made sounded and resonated much better. All of us are satisfied with the outcome of this project. Another peak would be team unity. I had a really good group; we cooperated really well and divided the work evenly. We communicated (very important in a group projects) well together to complete the task. We didn't have many pits. If I really had to come up with something, it would be a time management. We got all our supplies really late that we start building really late. We had four class days to build it. Eventually, we had to stay after school to finish it. Another pit would be screwing the parts together. The balsa wood splits very easily that we had to extra be careful; Mr.Williams helped us with it since he has more experiences with drilling in straight (Thank you Mr. Williams! :) ) This project was nice way to end our year; I really enjoyed this project and I am very happy and satisfied with our Ukulele.