My first build (link to album of build pictures in comments)
Posted Mar 8, 2020, 7:51 PM UTC
297
This is my first cigar box guitar, finished this weekend. I challenged myself to use as many of my spare parts lying around as possible, which is why you may see some strange design choices. Most importantly, it held up well during a jam session, especially when amplified. I may tinker with it to improve the grounding, as I get a little bit of buzz. If I find a way of easily uploading audio, and if there is any interest in it, I'll post a sample of what it sounds like.
Imgur album of the build process:
1
What are you doing on the stove?
1
I heated the head of a screw and burned circles into the fret board as fret markers.
2
Thanks for documenting and sharing your build. It's useful for me since the build didn't require power tools (except drill).
What type of wood did you use for the neck?
Did using the same fret spacing from a real guitar worked out okay? I hope so, it seems easier than measuring and using online calculator for fret spacing.
The Chinese site, Aliexpress, seems to sell similar accessories cheaper, I don't know if quality is bad though. I'll give it a go in the future.
I got a piece of poplar from Lowe's, 1" x 1.5" x 6', if I remember correctly. If you're going this route, browse through them and find the straightest piece.
The fret spacing worked perfectly. Making the marks was easy, and then I used a carpenter square (not shown) to ensure I got lines perpendicular to the neck starting from those points. I'm considering making a smaller rig into something akin to a uke/mandolin/lute and using my mandolin as reference.
Did you have to use a fine thin saw blade to cut the grooves for frets? I hope I can buy at big box stores without having to go to stewmac or gitty website and paying a lot of $.
As you can see in the album, I used a standard hacksaw that I bought at Lowe's. I did a lot of research into blade thicknesses, and I worried about it, but in the end, it worked just fine. I also used painter's tape along the blade to gauge cut depth. So, I don't encourage buying the expensive blade. I'd sooner encourage the purchase of a fret file; that was a very hard process with my general-purpose metal file, and I did end up scuffing the wood a bit.