What if I told you, there was a way to make your own guitar for less than $25 and under two hours? Yes under two hours, with ordinary wood working tools, you can have your own cigar box guitar. I can show you how to make your very own. Cigar box guitars were made out of cigar boxes, why? well in 1862 the United States government passed a law that required a tax on sinful behaviors. As a consequence cigarette were sold in standardized boxes containing a fixed amount of cigarettes 25, 50, and 100 in place to limit fraud. Now, before mass production American households were often too poor to afford a professionally made instrument. As a consequence they resorted to making their instruments from whatever they had at home. A popular choice was the cigar box.
My project features the western aesthetic take on the cigar box guitar. To make it I used a wooden chest, wooden decor panels, fishing wire, and some guitar tuning pegs. All shown below.
Now to make this I took a hole saw of 1/2″ diameter and drill a hole directly through the center of the box guitar. The box guitar had a center and was hollow with hole through the middle for good sound acoustics. Next I cut a hole according to the width of the accordion wall decor (the long wooden stick) through the short face of the guitar. This decor stick was going to function as the neck of my guitar. After cutting the hole I applied some wood glue and glued together the decor stick and the trunk box. The second to last part being the strings I used fishing wire. The was strong and could be fixed to be taught. My next problem was how to connect it to the guitar. The strings need to be tight and suspended above the plane of the guitar about half an inch or so. So I cut off some wood from the decor stick glued it to the face of the trunk box, right below the center hole and drilled three holes. Taking my fishing wire I slipped into those holes and tied a knot to the end. Finally, the tuning pegs were placed at the end of the decor stick and the fishing wire was tied into the tuning peg.
For me, if I could go back I would moved faster. There were a lot of small naunces that kept me stuck for a couple days. Things like how many holes should I place in my guitar, where should my hole be, how big should it be, should the strings be made from fluorocarbon or mono-filament, etc… While these are important I think I spent to much time deliberating over what part I should go with — in the future picking something that meets my requirements and just moving on instead of endlessly optimizing is the way to go. Finally different string material would be ideal because the string that I was using lost its tension the night before I brought it to class and made a very quiet noise.
