A few years ago, I started playing guitar at university and wanted to keep going when I moved around. My solution was to invest in a foldable Voyage Air guitar. It didn’t provide me with exactly the freedom and engineering satisfaction I was looking for: it was not truly foldable - it comes with a custom, oddly shaped backpack for carrying when packed away.

Since then, I’ve always dreamed about just sawing a ukulele in half to take it to the extremes with no compromises. A 20 dollar cheapo uke was used for exactly that.

What I started out with.

I used a chisel to separate the neck and body where it was joined. Turns out wood glue is very effective at binding - the separation was not very clean.

My idea was to fit the neck inside of the body when removed - I realized this required the neck to be further folded, near the nut. I went ahead and sawed that off, and opened up a door at the back.

The back and neck hinges after being installed. I used magnets to help keep the panel in place. The thin plywood also caused the hinge screws to loosen - generating a mysterious light buzz occasionally. This was later rectified with dabs of super glue. The neck hinge is held in place by string tension.

The fully assembled ukulele! The neck is secured by a long screw bolt + butterfly nut. It still played. It still sounded like a $20 ukulele.

What it looks like when stowed away. The neck is fully encased and the back panel shuts solidly. I had to take extra material off the headstock, tuners, and the bottom of the fretboard to make it possible to wiggle the neck in between the supports in the body. The pegs still poked out a little, but I drilled holes to make room, and now they help to hold the panel steady when closed!

Packed into the gig bag, which is also folded now. The loose bolt stays inside the body too, held in place by magnets. Strings can be left loose, or stuffed into the connecting hole in the neck, with an ear plug to hold them in place. The biggest disadvantage to this solution is the tuning when re-assembling. It was hard enough to keep a cheap ukulele in tune. It’d be great if there was a way to maintain a consistent string tension when folded! But that’s not even something Voyage Air has managed to solve.