Difficulty: Advanced

Cost: $$$

Some time ago, I came across an article about the Turturro Turnover Mandolin Ukulele.  I was fascinated by it and initially wanted to make a fully electric version with magnetic pickups.  I ran into a problem of routing out cavities for pickups on each side, while still keeping the body as thin as possible.  Instead I elected to use piezo rods as pickups.

I showed some early pictures of my build to King Uke of The Ukulele Blog.  He immediately dubbed it the “Hulberto Turnover”.   🙂

Here is a scan of the original patent drawing.  The rest of the patent can be found on Google Patents.

I used the patent drawing as a guide to cut out the body. The wood is cherry.

Both instruments have 13.875 inch scale lengths.  I could not find a tailpiece that looked like the original scallop-shell shaped one, so I fabricated one out of aluminum sheet metal.

I gave the body a red mahogany nitrocellulose lacquer finish.  The fretboards are rosewood.

The headstock is very crowded with all of those tuners.  The ukulele tuners are friction tuners.

A string retainer on each side keeps the strings on the nut.

I could turn this thing over all day long.

See it in action!