How to Make a Ukulele Wall Hanger

Awhile back I posted a blog called "Make your own ukulele wall hanger".  In that post I linked up to a Ukulele Underground article and video showing you how to make a multi uke wall hanger. 

Well, I decided to put that into action and make one myself using the same formula, but with a few variations.  Here's how I did it.

Materials

- (2) 4 ft. long 1x4 boards
- (2) #8 1 1/2" wood screws
- (3) #10 2 1/2" wood screws
- (4) plastic coated U shaped tool hangers

Total cost = $10.72

For those of you searching the hardware store for these materials, let me just give a couple tips so you don't waste a bunch of time (like I did).  First of all, look for the tool hangers in the storage area of the hardware store.  Odds are that they are probably there.  I spent an
hour going up and down wrong isles before I finally stumbled upon them.  Also, nice hardwood is expensive!  If you don't mind the appearance of cheaper wood, head to the value pile.  I got my 1x4's in that pile for 49 cents a piece.

Step 1 - find the studs in your wall

Using a stud finder....find the studs.  Pretty self-explanatory.  Mark the edges of each stud with a pencil.  On houses that aren't super old, you can usually plan on studs being roughly 16" apart. 

The stud finder that I have has an AC detector that is supposed to help you determine if you'll electrocute yourself when drilling into the wall.  Seems like a good idea, but I didn't find it very helpful since it never stopped beeping at me.  Apparently our house is just one big electrical death trap, so I decided to ignore the warnings and proceed at my own peril.

You can see that my daughter is as confused by this AC detector as I am.

Measure the distance of the middle of each stud to the middle of the next stud.  You want to make sure that when you drill the holes into your 1x4's, you are drilling at the places that will correspond with each wall stud.

Step 2 - Sand, measure and drill some holes

First things first, lightly sand the wood.  I used 220 grit sandpaper, followed by some 400.  Safety first, folks!  Get some goggles to protect your eyes and a dust mask!

Using 2 of those #8 1 1/2" wood screws, we're going to screw your 4 ft. boards together.  Anytime I screw into wood, I drill some smaller pilot holes to prevent the wood from cracking.  I measured 12" in from the edge of each side of the board length wise and tried to make sure that the pilot holes were in the center of the board.

Now, just use a screw driver to tightly secure the boards together.

Next step is to drill 3 holes where those 3 #10 2 1/2" wood screws will secure it to the wall.  You want to drill holes that are wide enough for the screw to fall through, but small enough so that the head of the screw doesn't fall through.  With this size of screw, 1/4" drill bit should do the trick. 

Your measurements for these holes should match the measurements that you took from the middle of one wall stud to the middle of the next wall stud.  These are the holes that will anchor this whole unit to the wall, so remember the carpenter's adage of measure twice, cut (or in this case drill) once. 

Do your best to make sure that your outer stud holes are approximately the same distance from the edge of the board on each side. 

For instance, when I measured from the middle of one wall stud to the middle of the next, I found that measurement to be 16 1/2".  The board length is 48".  So the outer wall stud hole from one side of my board to the outer wall stud hole on the other side should be a distance of 33" (or 16 1/2" x 2).  Subtracting 33" from 48" gives you 15".  This 15" should be the total distance of the outer edges of the board from the outer wall stud holes.  So....trying to keep things even, 15" divided by 2 gives us 7 1/2" on each side.  Confused?  Me too.  That's a lot of numbers and I'm sure I've done a terrible job explaining it.  Nonetheless, the idea should be to keep things even.

Step 3 - attach the tool hangers

Once again, you'll want to drill some smaller pilot holes to keep the wood from cracking.  Then, just screw these suckers in.

Back to my obsession with keeping things even.  I spaced these 12" apart, therefore the area that 4 of these hangers covers is 36".  So just start your outer hangers 6" from each edge and you'll be nice and even!

Step 4 - attach your uke hanger to the wall

This is really a two person job.  One person to hold up the hanger against the wall and another one to drill the 2 1/2" screws through the wall hanger and into the wall studs.  So have a friend help you, or do what I did and get married!


Use a level to make sure that it's...ya know...level.

 Step 5 - hang your ukuleles up

Not much left to do, but hang those ukes up and pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

Hope that this little step by step tutorial will guide you in your quest to get your ukes to higher ground!