The past weekend was the ANZAC day long weekend, and seeing as I am a little burned out with programming work at the moment, I decided to take a little break from the keyboard and screen, and to tackle a project that I have been thinking about for years now - building a "cigar box" style guitar.
I've seen many people build these online, but never actually tried myself, so I looked around the house this weekend and decided that I had enough scrap material lying around to give it a go.
I don't actually have any cigar boxes lying around, but my wife did have an old art supply carry case that she no longer used, which was sitting in the back of the shed going mouldy, so she said I could have that. Great. I found a nice long piece of Merbau timber that was perfect for the neck. 80% there! Collecting some old tuners from a dismantled Squier Strat, and cutting up some threaded rod and buying an ornate bracket, and we pretty much had all the parts for the guitar. No excuses.
I posted about this build 'nearly live' on my Instagram account. When I started posting, I had no idea whether the project would come to fruition or not, so I was taking a risk, but also, I was putting in place some accountability, because I knew I had an audience following along with me.
I also had no plans - just a rough idea of how to go about this from a blog post I had seen many months ago. Never mind - I actually built a real acoustic guitar 3 years ago, so this couldn't be any more difficult, could it?
As it turns out, the process was fairly straightforward, and I managed to accomplish the build using rudimentary tools, and some very journeyman carpentry skills. As you can see from the progress photos, I decided to put frets on the neck of this guitar, although that was a moot point, as I was going to set it up as a very high action slide guitar.
Once I had assembled the guitar proper (with some able assistance from my older son), I handed the project off to my wife, and asked her to paint anything she liked on it.
Given the current loss to the music world, she decided to paint a portrait of Prince on the guitar, and I think she did a fabulous job of it.
That was a really fun build, and kept most of the family occupied and creative, and we ended up with a great tribute to a superb artist that left us all too soon.