Cigar Box Scratch Build

It had to happen. This is my first attempt to build a guitar rather than repair one.

So it’s an attempt to build a 3 string electric cigar box guitar. The first two parts were a cigar box and a 3 string neck from ebay.

I might need to adjust things once I have the other parts and have a better feel for the height of the bridge and the tuner heads. But out comes the craft hacksaw since cigar box wood is very light, it’s like some sort of plywood almost not like real wood and I hack a hole for the neck’s lower parts. Since the cigar box is so flimsy I am going to need that bottom part of the neck wood to screw the bridge into as it will probably stay put that way rather than string tension rip the cigar box away. Bridge arrived but back to the drawing board. The bridge is larger than the neck width so now the plan is to get some wood inside the cigar box in order to have a strong base to screw into that fits around the lower end of the guitar neck.

The neck came very plain so I rubbed in some boiled linseed oil to help condition it. Actually after the first layer of boiled linseed oil, I swapped to using tung oil. Tuning heads arrived too but I need to get a few layers of tung oil on first before the heads go on.

So I bought a pack of 4 tuning heads and didn’t realise these were 2 left handed and 2 right handed. Since I liked the look of the heads, I bought a second pack so I could get my 3 tuning heads attached.

I’m not sure I really got the hang of the tung oil application, some of it clumped into ugly looking blobs after it dried out. Still this is just a cigar box guitar so I am not going to lose sleep that it’s not perfect.

I am slowly cutting away at my wood block to get it the right shape. Meanwhile I was treating another neck with boiled linseed oil so also gave this neck a coat. Because I just have a little handsaw it took a while to cut the block to shape to fit inside the cigar box.

Happy with the box I started to think about fitting the hardware. Then I released that I needed to chisel a groove in the block to allow the cable from the pickup to the output jack to pass through the block.

Rough and ready but this is inside the box where it won’t be seen. A little drilling, screwing, glueing, and hacking some holes for the output jack and pickup later and I had the electrics in so fitted the nut and strung up the instrument.

cigar box 1.png