My Cigar Box Guitar Build

During one of my Interwebnet surfing sessions I came across a DIY article about building your own guitar on the MAKE  web site.The article was about building a version of the Cigar Box Guitar using a license  plate and home made box instead of a cigar box.

This is a picture from the article.

I'm a fan of simple projects like this. There are many options, frets or fret-less, acoustic or electric, home built box or cigar box, 3 string or 4 string..... The options are up to the builder and the only limit is your imagination. These guitars beg to be built with "found" materials and to stay true to the spirit of the CBG they should be.  

While using only found materials for this build is very tempting and I went back and forth, I wanted the first build to be as painless as possible so I settled on ordering most of the materials. I plan on building more than one of these so I can add more "found" parts in later versions.
Fret wire, tuner pegs and piezo  pick ups are on the way. I also found cigar boxes for sale on line and have a few on their way.

To get started I went to the local big box hardware store and bought a 1X2" piece of oak 6' long. If all goes well I should be able to get 2 necks out of it. 

I cut the oak board in half.

I just eyeballed the angle for my scarf joint and drew some layout lines. I managed to get a pretty good cut.

The cut needed some cleaning up, so I used a hand file to get the cut as straight and smooth as I could.

To keep the joint from slipping during glue up and to add some strength I pinned it with two 1/4" dowels.

Glued up and and clamped, I'll let it sit over night with the clamps on.

After the glue set up over night I removed the clamps and cut the dowels off flush. I'll get out the sander and smooth everything out later in the build.

I found a fret calculator on line and used that to print out a template. It took two pages for the 24" scale with 24 frets. I cut a notch in one sheet so they could be lined up.

I trimmed the excess paper and taped the template to the neck.

To mark the fret placement I used a square and a razor knife.

It worked very well.

I'll cut the slots for the frets with a coping saw, the cuts made with the razor knife should help guide the saw.

While I do have cigar boxes ordered they aren't going to be delivered until next week. Since the license plate guitar is what inspired me I stopped at an Antique store and picked up a license plate with just the right amount of patina.

Using the dimensions of the license plate I built a box for the body of the guitar out of 1/2"X3" Poplar. I didn't take any pictures of this part of the build but it's pretty straight forward, miter joints for the corners and blocks to reinforce each corner. 

One small mishap with the router while I was thinning down the neck to keep the fingerboard above the level of the license plate. No harm done, it will be covered by the license plate.

I cut the notches for the neck and cleaned them up with wood chisels. The bridge end of the neck will sit in a pocket, I'm hoping this will add strength.

Things are coming together. The box survived the cutting of the notches, I have one more block to glue in so I can use the existing holes in the license plate to bolt it down.

There is plenty more to do, but I'm waiting on my parts order to arrive. I'm going to wait for those to get here before I go any farther.

UPDATE: My parts showed up today. C.B. Gitty did a fine job and the parts showed up very quickly.

Pickups and wiring kit, strings, tuners and frets.

The coping saw worked for cutting the fret slots, I did end up having to remove the set from the teeth to get the slot a little narrower. 

The fret wire came in 8 inch pieces, I got 5 frets from each piece. There are 15 frets on my neck so I only used 3 pieces of fret wire. I used a piece of scrap Poplar and a ball peen hammer to drive the frets home.  

I learned a few things on my first neck, I need to modify my side cutters so they will cut the fret wire closer to the finger board. (less filing) and I need to take more time cutting the fret slots, the last two I cut I wasn't paying close enough attention and they ended up not perfectly parallel.