For Liverpool Makefest 2019 I wanted to not just show how regular guitars are built, but I also wanted to show that you could keep things simple and still have a wonderful instrument: you can build a cigar box guitar! A friend who collects cigar boxes kindly donated a suitable box for the cause, and I got to work.
In the end I did get a bit carried away: I’d never built a guitar with an angled headstock, so this felt like a chance to do so, and thus it’s not quite the simplest of cigar boxes. But I did otherwise keep things simple: the tail-piece is a hinge from a jewellery box, the bridge is a bolt held in a wooden block, and the tuners were just second hand cheap tuners.
For all the basic materials, the cigar box punches well above its weight sonically, with the cigar box being a much better acoustic amplifier than I expected, such that I mostly now play this unplugged.
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