Cigar Box Guitar
This I made for my Uncle. He’s an excellent guitar player and I thought he’d like the challenge of something a little more rough. The cbg (cigar box guitar) came as a kit from mojocbg. It’s simple enough to get all the parts individually, but I was in a time crunch and didn’t want to chase everything down. The neck comes w/ a few of the major cuts made and the frets are marked. So all fret lines have to be cut and the neck sanded down. I put in the fret wire and used a dremel to grind down the excess and a file to further smooth that. I also stained the neck a bit and put on 3 coats of a hand rubbed polyurethane. I found the threaded rod they supplied for the bridge to be excessively large, so I replaced it w/ a bit of 1/4-20 all thread and milled a few hundreds of an inch off the bottom to match it w/ the 1/4-20 they supplied for the nut. Also, instead of gluing across the whole soundboard, I milled out the neck to relieve the soundboard and provide a spot for an acoustic pickup.
Between the overnight gluings, waiting for stain and poly to dry and all other misc work put in, it was about a 4 day (or rather night) build. It sounds pretty good, but pretty much requires a slide to play. I did end up cutting the top of a vodka bottle for an authentic bottleneck slide for him as well…
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