I have always been a tinkerer. I like taking stuff apart, understanding it and then use that knowledge to build more…stuff.  Just last summer I started tinkering with leftover wood at home after reading about cigar box guitars on the internet. I found the creativity behind these instruments to be truly inspiring. The poor would pickup empty cigar boxes from the trash, nail a broomstick and screen-door wire to it and there you go… a guitar.

There is a definitely clever, yet naive approach to how these instruments were designed and put together.  There was little consideration for “accoustics” other that to have some form of wire vibrate while being attached to some form of box that should make it resonate louder. The box and the string could be anything as we can observe from other instrument of the same era like the tub bass.

Some days after reading about these guitars on the internet I was walking in a store when my eye caught sight of little wooden boxes. I inspected said boxes and found them to be adequate, at the very least, for  some experimental prototype guitar to test out the basic idea. I scraped around the house and found two thin pieces of wood I managed to glue together to get a sort of neck going. I had some tuners around, old strings. I made a nut and a bridge out of milliputt, an epoxy compound that hardens to a rock-like state that can be sanded and filed into any shape.

I stringed the weird-looking contraption, tuned up until I felt some tension in the strings under my fingers and I strummed my first strum. Woots! Not only was there a sound coming out of that thing, but the pitch was stable and the whole string/box combination was clearly working, even with the with the crap materials I was using.

Having a working prototype made me want to make more, and to improve on how simple and efficient I could make the design as well as how good they played as musical instruments. I wanted to make something that could be used in a band, not something cute you put on the wall as decoration.

So that is how I got started! As I go along exploring how to make better guitars,  I will be posting little articles about my adventures in crafting these awesome little instruments. These articles will appear in the sidebar as they become available.