Cigar boxes and oddities

Spare necks

Maple body

(Listen to "39 miles" below)

39miles.m4a

English walnut body

First the oddities. Although our real interests are in acoustic instruments, we did venture into cigar-boxes and oddities. These oddities, basically plank guitars, were platforms for a couple of archtop necks we had made. Most of the archtop neck making is comparatively easy, but coming up with a profile that satisfied both of our friends and us took a few attempts to sort out. Rather than trash the “off casts”, we turned them into electric guitars. Because the necks were designed for archtop guitars they are ridiculously thick for an electric guitar. We also learned where not to put the cable sockets, and how uncomfortable it can be to balance a plank on your thigh.

An important part of learning to draw and then make 3-D arched guitar plates on the CNC router was machining reduced-scale plates. That way our mistakes didn’t cost so much (time and money). But having finally made a top and back, we had to do something with it. So here, as work in progress, is an arched electric slide - what?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

C-b guitar construction

Box-banjo neck joint area

Inside the box banjo

Finished box banjo and amp

Now for cigar boxes. A good friend makes these, so we thought we should try. First a guitar. It is amazing that you can buy finished necks for around $35 on e-bay, so we started with one of those. Add a box, and go about strengthening it. What you see in the picture is definitely “over engineered”, with a through-piece of glued three maple strips running from the neck base to the back of the box, so that this is effectively a “through-neck” guitar. Also there are lateral box-top supports at neck and tail to support the lid. We will try and persuade our friend to explain how he makes his without our excesses. We added a piezo pickups and an internal preamplifier (the blue box). We explored piezo disc pickups stuck to the underside of the top, and piezo rod and coaxial cable pickups placed in a trough in a low wood bridge that supported a bone saddle that in turn compressed the rod or cable. Our best results were obtained with the coaxial cables. A good source for cigar box instrument parts is https://www.cbgitty.com/piezo-rods/ .

For the banjo, we made our own substantive box with a specific picture we wanted to use. We made our own neck, bolted to the open box. Both internal disc and external coaxial under-saddle pickups were included, and a preamp. The top (5 mm ply) was supported off the walls at the 4 corners by bolts, leaving a long low aperture for a Helmholtz resonance. Extra top support (two small wood fingers) were added on each long side.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse