Making a Cigar Box Guitar (and 10 easy-to-make mistakes)
Channel: hyperdata
Date: 2018-05-13

My first CBG, how I built it and the many things that went wrong along the way, though with a very satisfactory result. 

A couple of things I forgot to mention : 
* When attaching the new head, as well as the epoxy glue I also put in two dowel plugs, which held it together while the glue dried and should make the joint much stronger.
* As I made the mistake with the neck length, I wound up using a spreadsheet to calculate the fret positions. Pretty straightforward.

Apologies for the quality of the video - I've no idea why the last section came out a bit blurred. It was my first attempt with 'proper' video editing software (Lightwave, doing final encoding with Handbrake). Got titles!

Here, in no particular order are the main mistakes/mishaps (all worked around) :

* bad choice of wood for the neck
* mistake in laying out the neck - should have double-checked everything
* first attempt at putting in a fret was wonky - should have practiced on a bit of scrap
* varnish reacted with the cigar box paint, should have tested on a small area (I now consider this serendipitous, have grown to like the effect)
* overtuning - should have paid more attention to the string tension rather than the tuner
* should have checked neck stain on marker dots before slapping it on
* tail slope was laid out wrong, hadn't allowed enough slope down from bridge
* didn't take enough care over attaching neck to box, was too tight, ended up with a small gap
* head broke off! (result of a combination of poor choice of wood and poor design)
* used gouges rather that a fine saw to cut out sound holes - was a little untidy
* hadn't considered electrically grounding the strings 

Happy constructing!

I may post more about this some time, here or at 
http://hyperdata.it

btw, I'm @danja on Twitter.