30 Days of Creativity - #21-25

Cigar Box Guitar

Figure 1. Cigar box instrument as it was.

I brought home a cigar box guitar that needed some improvements. A friend had started it and roughly finished it, and he decided to give me a shot it. It was an unelectrified, three string instrument with a very high action suitable for slide playing (Figure 1).

I worked on it over a five-day period, and accomplished the following:

(1) Made a new nut from a piece of 1/4-inch steel rod. Filed string grooves into the rod with a jeweler's file.
(2) Reshaped and sanded the neck and headstock to make it smoother and look a little better.
(3) Reshaped the sound hole to make it look a little better.
(4) Reshaped and stabilized the steel the bridge by reinforcing it with a brass backing plate.
(5) Machined a slot in the neck to hold a pickup. I purchased the pickup used from a local music store.
(6) Installed and tested pickup. It didn't work. Further investigation revealed a broken wire inside it. I couldn't fix it so I returned it and they gave me another one. It worked.
(7) Improved the string holes in the back of the neck by using three identical nuts (the previous nuts didn't match) held in place with super glue.
(8) Made a backing plate for the tuners from  thin piece of walnut. The headstock was a little too thin to properly fasten the tuners in place. Even when tightened all the way they were loose.
(9) Stained the neck.
(10) Painted the body brown since it was kind of torn up looking and did not have an attractive cigar box look.
(11) Assembled it and strung it up.

Figure 2 shows how it looked in a state of disassembly. You can see the pickup slot in the neck. Due to the through-body design of the neck this was the only way to mount the pickup. The pickup was a used single coil (made in China).

The string holes were supported in the back with steel nuts inserted and glued into the wood. The groove between the string holes and the pickup hole is where the bridge was installed. The saddle is held in place by string tension only. It works!



This is how it turned out:






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