The Mini-Uke
Collaboration
How a batch of high school kids
made life more fun for children with cancer.
by Michael Dresdner
This year, at a camp on Vashon Island for children with
cancer, 100 campers will each get to build and take home a ukulele, thanks to a
few local businesses and the volunteer efforts of students from Rogers High
School’s woodshop program.
It all started with a challenging request. My daughter, her
boyfriend (both survivors of childhood cancer) and my son all volunteer every
summer at Camp Goodtimes, a free, one-week sleepover
camp run by the American Cancer Society for children who’ve had or have cancer.
Each day is filled with fun activities to allow the kids to escape what for
many is a rather harsh reality. There’s a cruise on an Argosy boat, a circus
brought by the Rotary club, a whipped cream fight and much more.
So in April, when my kids asked if I could come up with a
way for the older campers to make ukuleles for themselves, I simply asked “how
many ukes, how old are the kids, and how much assembly time will they have?”
“One hundred kids, aged ten through fourteen, and they’ll
have less than an hour.”
Thus began the challenge; make 100 uke kits simple enough to
be assembled safely in half an hour by kids who’d never done woodworking, and
somehow make it all cheap enough to donate. The deadline was less than two
months away, and my company, Rainy Day Ukes, is a one-man shop. I’d need help.
I drew up plans for a pineapple shaped body cut from a 6” by
8” board, with a five inch circular rout from the back leaving barely an eighth
inch top remaining. The bridge would be a wood triangle and the neck a stick of
wood, slotted and fretted. It would be bolted into a pocket routed in the top,
with zither pins at the bottom of the body to tighten the strings. Once
knotted, the strings would go through small holes in the neck just past a
zero-fret nut. (I’ve included the original drawings, and photos of the parts,
in case another charity-minded group wants to do this for another worthy set of
recipients.)
I took neck wood and uke strings from my shop and bought hundreds
of zither pins and tuning wrenches. Ken Warmoth of Warmoth Guitars immediately
offered the body wood, screws, fret wire, and all the programming and CNC
running time to slot the necks and cut the bodies. Several local individuals
donated money to offset the cost of the parts, but we also needed labor to
assemble the kits. A Pierce
County employee and three
Argosy employees helped out, but the lion’s share came from the local high
school.
Jon Cerio, the woodshop teacher at Rogers High School in Puyallup, introduced the idea to his class, and they took to it. His students cut the bodies on their CNC machine, shaped and fretted necks, and did the secondary machining and sanding. They then used their program’s laser to engrave each uke with “Camp Goodtimes.”
And that’s how a few people in Puyallup and a bunch of enthusiastic high
school kids gave up their time to a project to cheer up youngsters stricken
with childhood cancer. By the time camp is over, 100 kids will head home with a
ukulele they put together themselves, with a little help from a very caring
community.
#30
YouTube story by KIRO TV news about Camp Goodtimes
For more information, contact:
Michael Dresdner 253 770 1664
