I would start smaller though. There are a lot of half finished airplanes (where the last 20% takes 80% of the time...) and the maker is dead.
I've been working on a ukulele for over a year now and it isn't close to done yet, and this is a much smaller project. (Or maybe I should say I've been working on raising kids for a decade and there is another left?).
Oh, yeah. I’ve been meaning to build an electric ukulele. I’ve built some handmade electric guitars, slide guitars and similar. Mine are rudimentary, more akin to a cigar box guitar (if not less complex).
I've built half a dozen similar box guitars, it's such a fun little thing to build.
Do I see a piezo disk under the bridge in the 3rd instrument? Do you use some kind of preamp with it?
I have been recently experimenting with different kinds of piezo pickups [0] and preamp electronics for them. I've figured out a pretty nice JFET based circuit for the preamp and ordered tiny 13x13mm PCBs with tiny SMT components assembled and it works pretty well (but needs a second revision). They mount directly on the volume potentiometer and fit in a small space.
The one thing I haven't figured out yet is grounding the electronics. In a typical electric guitar you ground the electronics by touching the (grounded) strings, but that doesn't work very well (at all) with slide guitar when your left hand has got a bottle neck slide on it (made of glass or ceramic which is an insulator).
Drop a message below if you want to geek out more about home made guitars and/or related electronics. Depending on your location I could also send some preamp PCBs your way.
Happy to stay in touch. I haven't build one of these in a long time. My website and email address are in my bio here on HN.
To answer your question, yes, that's a piezo pickup, if I remember correctly. I don't think I had any kind of pre-amp. I wired it to a 1/8" stereo plug and then connected that to a very small portable guitar amp. It was all very rudimentary. A very distorted sound. I don't remember grounding to be a problem but I played the slide version of this with a slide made from a galvanized pipe, rather than glass.
I've been working on a ukulele for over a year now and it isn't close to done yet, and this is a much smaller project. (Or maybe I should say I've been working on raising kids for a decade and there is another left?).