Anybody have a cigar box guitar ? I have an old wooden cigar box that I've been saving to build one. I've got a used single coil lipstick pickup some spare pots and output jack so I'm getting ready to just go ahead and build one.

Has anyone built one or have one ? Anything you'd recommend as far as construction ? If you have any pics of what you've got I'd love to see them. I'm thinking of making a laminated neck with maple and sappele. I have a full wood shop so I have no problem making whatever I need.

Let me know your thoughts.

No, but I'm stalking Samantha Fish and she does amazing things with hers

Very nice

There's a whole thread about them in here...might be in the archives. Somebody here was building them.

I started building them and diddley bows.
Theres a dedicated vendor i used to buy parts from.
CB gitty iirc.

They got pretty popular fast and some builders ask a pretty price for thier stuff.

Eta.

If you can find full wood boxs vs cardboard the better.
Also if your inclined. Get an oliva G cigar box and build a travel amp.

You going fretless or going to fret the neck.
I went fretless on mine because i was being cheap. I also used a 60mm iirc piezo pick up with  volume pot on my bows. Attached File

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I plan on fretting the neck, and the box I have is all wood. It looks to be spanish cedar, very nice wood.

One thing to look into. Or i did is to run the neck straight through end to end.
Only reason was some cigar boxes are thin.
The black pickled looking bow i posted is a box from hobby lobby.
Super thin and a decent size. 2-inches deep by 8 by 11 roughly. Id say its 1/8 or less thick on its top.
Woods crappy( thin popular/pine) but on my non electric ones it sounded better/louder.

Was going to send link to a guitar store I was in two summers ago that had some outstanding cigar box guitars (just for ideas), highest quality I've ever seen. Sadly I found this when searching for it...

There was one here, i went in to see thier CBGs they had( hanging in the front window). Very well made and avg price was 350$ .
Some builders though make them look like a scrap pile of parts got tossed on a box lol.

Found my old pic from Creed!

Cool stuff. Sorry I forgot it was you, Protus. Memory can get a little fuzzy and I was feeling too lazy to do an archive search.

I just did chuggers and bows
Started down the CBG rabbit hole and got side tracked into guitars lol .
I should dig out my parts and build a actual electric/acoustic CBG with a lipstick pick up....

That'd be cool. With only 3 strings, you could really angle the pickup if you wanted to.

There's some really good videos on building cigar box guitars on Facebook

This thread really piqued my interest in CBGs - I bought a couple of books that show how others have built theirs, and have been collecting parts.

I have 10 different cigar boxes now - only one of them has the 'cardboardy' look, while the rest have exposed wood all around.

The instructions for the 3-string guitar build detailed in chapter 2 of the Making Poor Man's Guitars book by Shane Speal (https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1565239466 ) are based on a 'cardboardy' one, which he calls the "drop-in lid" style. He refers to the other style as "Boite Nature", which he describes as having a lid that overlaps the sides.

So I will use the one with the "drop-in lid" for my first build. I will have to look for other designs to see how they handle the "boite nature" style box, which I will use for my subsequent builds - does anyone have any suggestions for a good design using that style of cigar box?

So I've been collecting different styles of open and closed tuning machines, and some medium fret wire (I will try both fretless and fretted designs), and some strings, and some rod piezo transducers with matching preamps (I will try some electrified ones, both with piezo transducers and magnetic pickups, as well as some acoustic ones - my first build will follow the fretless 3-string acoustic design, with the 23-inch scale, as shown in the book).

I have scrounged up various pieces of hardware that I will use for improvised nuts and bridges, as well as some more conventional bridges, and I may try experimenting with some bone nuts or maybe will try making nuts from Delrin.

I have also picked up a few pieces of poplar and maple that I will use to make the necks.

While I plan to stick pretty closely to the design in the book for the first one, I expect that I will try plenty of my own experiments for the ones that follow.

Now all I need to do is start watching some YouTube videos so that I can teach myself to strum, use a slide, and then figure out some chords...

Seans



Been the cbg pimp for a bit.
Dont get hung up on slide playing