Hello, hivers!
I built an electric baritone ukulele a couple of years ago and wrote a series of posts about it. If you would like to read the last of those posts, this is the link.
@amberyooper/building-a-guitar-body-part-8
I've been playing it intermittently since I built it and decided to replace the pickup with a different one, one that comes with a cover plate for the pickup hole in the body. The pickup that has been in the body since I built it didn't have a cover plate for the hole, and I had originally bought that pickup for my Squire Stratocaster.
Here's the body before I started the job. The new pickup is next to the body.
The first thing to do was to remove the cover plate with the controls. The wires for the pickup are soldered onto the controls, so I had to unsolder them.
Next, the pickup is unscrewed from the body and removed.
Then the new pickup was fitted to the body. I had to get the pickup centered in the body hole so that I could mark the places to drill the screw holes for the pickup cover plate. This pickup is mounted to the body by the cover plate screws.
When I tried to fit the wires into the controls cavity, I discovered that it was too shallow to fit everything without problems. I decided to make the cavity deeper, something I probably should have done when I built the ukulele. I drilled a bunch of shallow holes close together in the bottom of the cavity, probably about 1/4 inch, or 6mm deep. Drilling the holes close together makes it easier to remove the rest of the wood from the bottom of the cavity. I didn't want to go any deeper because I didn't want to accidentally go through the bottom of the body.
After drilling out as much of the wood as I could, I used one of my carving chisels to cut out the rest of what I needed to remove. After test fitting to make sure everything fit, I soldered the new pickup wires onto the controls.
Then it was just a matter of putting the controls assembly back in place and putting the screws in the cover plate, and the pickup swap is done.
Now all I have to do is put new strings on it and I can test it. I'm thinking about stringing it with heavy strings so that I can tune it an octave down and see what that sounds like. It would be tuned D, G, B, E, like the upper not strings on a guitar, that's the standard baritone ukulele tuning, except it would be an octave lower with fat strings. If that doesn't work out, or if I don't like it, I'll just put regular strings on it like it had before.
That's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
