Cigar Box Guitar No.1
The Electric Guitar Project got me really interested in making musical instruments. I hope to make a nice acoustic guitar from scratch someday, but I have a lot to learn about building necks and tuning for good tone etc.
To gain experience I decided to make a 4 string cigar box slide guitar. This is the kind of home made instrument delta blues musicians would play back in the 20′s and 30′s. I figured it would be a good starting place to learn about neck building because the stresses are less with only 4 strings and since it is a slide guitar my fretting doesn’t have to be perfect.
Lydia let me have an old cigar box she used to use to display rings. the top was useless since she had cut a window in it, so I routed it off and glued on a spruce soundboard I have lying around. The neck is made of red oak from a local hardware store and runs through the body. The nut and saddle are rosewood and the fingerboard is cherry.
Here it is. It sounds pretty cool. kind of twangy. Very bluesy.
Here you can see the cherry tailpiece. the neck runs through the body and extend a few inches out the other side so the strings can run through it.
The head is angled back. I used some vintage style tuners I got on clearance from Stew-Mac
I like the open gears and etched design on the tuners. They were only $10 a set and they work fine. I wish I had ordered more because I cant find them anymore.
I used a cheap piezo electric transducer from radio shack as a pickup and soldered it to a spare jack I had. It sounds badass with some overdrive. Id like to make a single coil pickup for this guitar at some point.
It’s a lot of fun to play. I got a bunch of cigar boxes from a local smoke shop. Im going to make a few more of these and maybe try to sell them.
Tags: cigar box guitar