How-To: The Panjolele Cake Pan Ukulele

What can you make with two cake pans, 20 toothpicks, some lumber, and a handful of screws? A Panjolele! Whitehall, Michigan-based maker Chester Winowiecki loves to make his own musical instruments. A few years back, Chester wanted to make a cigar box ukulele and had the box and wood, but needed to order the frets and a slotted fretboard. Itching to make, he thought about how to substitute those parts:

I remembered someone using toothpicks for frets on cigar box guitars, and while I was wary of steel strings cutting into the wooden frets, I thought a ukulele’s nylon strings should be fine. Toothpicks for frets: check.

I’d also seen a lot of instruments built with cookie tins for the body, so I headed to the local resale shop to look for one. No tins, but what I did find was even better. Nice, rigid aluminum cake pans, in two sizes. “Resophonic instruments use aluminum cones, don’t they?” I thought. Cake pans for the body: check.

I brought my treasures home and found a nice piece of hardwood for the neck. Luckily, I had a set of tuners and strings on hand. I got to work and a few days later, I had a cake pan uke!

The name? Early in ukulele history, Alvin D. Keech introduced a banjo ukulele that eventually got the name banjolele. Looking like it does, it seemed natural to call my instrument a Cake Pan-jolele, or Panjolele for short.

So while you do indeed tuners and strings, the rest of the tools and materials list is pretty basic. Chester shared his full how-to on the pages of MAKE Volume 33. We posted it on our site so you can start gathering materials and building right away.

And the sound? Check out Chester playing “Sweet Georgia Brown”:

And Chester accompanied by Adrian Schuster, his bandmate in the Bearded Ladies Men, jammin out Robert Johnson’s 1936 classic “They’re Red Hot”: