Three Cigar Box Guitars

Three cigar box guitars are finished and ready to deliver! At ten stringed instruments since November, I’ve now covered all the bases with grandkids and wife. Whoo hoo! I have one more started which I plan to take my good sweet time with – a 4-string tenor dobro/resonator guitar. With this next one I will apply everything I’ve learned so far – which is quite a bit! There is a lot of fun in building these, a lot more than I had suspected.

These sound really good, especially when plugged into an amp, and I think the kids will enjoy them. Each one has an amp piezo pickup installed. These have geared mechanical tuners and they are a 24” string length with fifteen frets each. The cigar boxes are part of a lot from a swap meet, all brand-new, and had ‘never seen cigars’, not that I would have cared. Two of the necks are white ash with cherry fretboards, and one is black walnut all the way.

Guitar players will likely note one of these has a left-handed peg-head. However, that one is currently also strung for a right-hander. The left-handedness was not intended and is just a mistake on my part. Like I said, I am learning a lot. But, it could make it disconcerting for someone to tune until they get used to it!

I did not keep track of the total time spent on these, but a rough estimate would be at twenty to twenty-five hours each, and possibly more. One problem was I had to re-build all the (cheap Chinese) tuning gears. They were far too sloppy as received and I had to disassemble them to tighten them up with some judicious taps with and upholsterer’s hammer, then reassemble them with LocTite Threadlocker since the screws were very loose, allowing the gears to slip. I turned a wooden socket on the lathe so the tuners can be quickly adjusted with a power drill – a huge time-saver for me!

These were about as much fun as I’ve had with my clothes on in quite a while!

-- "Never let your dogma be run over by your karma!"