Outdoor Instruments™ was started by Scott and Jennifer Seelye in 2015. Scott was an Industrial Designer for 20 years, developing products for consumer and aerospace industries. The Seelye's were born and raised in Oregon, where the instruments are manufactured.
Development of our first instrument took a couple of years, since injection molding thin wall high performance polymers with composite reinforcements in long lengths was considered near impossible. It all came down to part design, some wonderful polymer chemists, talented injection molders, and very large injection molding machines.
Our instruments are injection molded on hardened steel tools at 600°F under 420 tons of pressure. Polycarbonate reinforced with carbon fiber strands give the instruments a natural grain structure that greatly increase strength and acoustics. 4X stronger than ABS plastic instruments and weather resistant.
Parts are joined using an industrial grade cyanoacrylate adhesive, and the joined parts are placed into machined aluminum fixtures for curing. This precisely sets the action as low as possible on our instruments. Our shop is temperature and humidity controlled so the CA adhesive cures properly.
We manufacture our instruments using the lean system. This process takes 3 days, and we produce 6 instruments each day. We assemble every Ukulele, Banjolele, and Guitar at our shop in Corvallis, Oregon. Our parts are injection molded in Everett, Washington.
We use custom made tuning machines with cast baseplates and precision ground gears, which are installed using stainless steel screws with alternating low and high threads, developed for polymers.
Our strings are custom made by D'Addario in Farmingdale, NY. Ukuleles and Banjoleles use fluorocarbon strings, which are high tension and bright sounding. Guitars use custom made silver plated nylon core bass strings and fluorocarbon treble strings. We tune the instrument multiple times over 24 hours to pre-stretch the strings.
We want to thank all the customers and dealers that supported us over the years. We love receiving emails with stories and photos showing your adventures around the world. Photos of customers actually playing in the Arctic Ocean and climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. We enjoy shipping instruments to hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail and Appalachian Trail every season. We have amazing dealers in countries like Germany, Holland, France, Japan, and China. It's hard to imagine that we've built and shipped more than 20,000 instruments.