I built a Cigar Box Guitar. My friend Joe Rames had built one and I thought it was cool and then I saw some while in London that just looked amazing. I loved the idea and decided to build my own.
I started with a 1×2 piece of poplar wood and started trimming it down. The head needed to be back far enough to make some tension on the nut (the piece at the top that the wires run over).
And then I needed to carve out the bottom of the neck because I wanted to make a through neck and that required carving it down to let the cigar box close. This was a little tough as I didn’t have power tools and did it by hand with a saw and a chisel.
Then I pieced glued on the bits for inside the box so that it was nice and sturdy. I probably need to redo this at some point because it’s about an 1/8 of an inch short of the bottom of the box and so is not quite touching and stable. But it works for now.
The tuning pegs were the first “guitar” part that I bought. Almost everything else was from home depot, radio shack and my local cigar shop. Figuring out where to mount these was harder than it should be. My next one is likely going to be headless with the pegs inside the box so that it’s a much more compact design.
Then I carved out the cigar box for the neck to fit in. Next time the neck will likely go all the way through the cigar box and out the other side but for this first one, the neck goes through and stops just inside the other wall.
Then I installed the 1/4 inch jack for the pickup and built my own pickup out of a piezo buzzer. That was fun and it works great (watch the video)… The next step was building the amp itself.
Yeah – the guitar looks good. 🙂 but I actually had a lot of work left to do at this point. I don’t have good pictures of putting the frets in. However, that wasn’t as hard as I was afraid it would be. I found an online template maker where you enter in the measurements of your guitar and it’ll print a template for where your frets should be.
I decided at this point to build my own amp as well. I have an amp but it’s big, heavy and doesn’t travel well. Oh, and it’s not in a cigar box… 🙂
It’s a slightly different shape than the other cigar box but I think it looks class. I’ll likely switch out the green light for a red one in the near future but at the moment I like the green as well.
This was actually the first circuit I’ve ever soldered so that was a learning curve as well. Reality is that now that I’ve done it, I’m not sure what I was so scared of all those years. I started with design for a Cracker Box amp and modified it to have an on/off, the little LED and a few other little bits and bobs.
And there you have it – finished product. I’m pretty proud of it. Now to learn to play it…