Box guitars and fiddles date back to at least the early 19th century. More recently, wooden boxes have been turned into ukuleles, basses, and even electric guitars. Well, we thought we might try a few and find out what is involved with turning a simple wooden box into a playable musical instrument.

Cigar boxes, with their finger-jointed corners and charming logos branded into Spanish Cedar, are most favored for making box guitars. They are readily available in antique shops, markets, and on the Internet.

For our box guitars, we machined some timber and went to the table saw, and made some finger joints. Then we moved on to the dovetail jig and made some through-dovetail versions. For a bit of a challenge, we introduced simple curves and some steam bending, with the help of an ordinary household steam iron and ironing board. For the lids we experimented with a few lesser-known alternative species of Pine and Spruce.

For the first batch we chose a common guitar scale length and used only three strings. For the back and sides we made a couple of boxes in White Oak and another pair in Scented Rosewood, a close relative of Cedar. For the lid or soundboard, we tried Huon Pine (Tasmania) and Blue Spruce (New South Wales).

Now an interesting thing that Cigar Box Guitar (CBG) makers are doing is what I call a ‘through neck’, that is, the neck extends entirely through the body and becomes the tailpiece. This is very much like another early folk instrument called the Diddley Bow, or ‘strum-stick’. The Cigar Box Guitar in its barest form is a Diddley Bow, with a sound box attached to it. The ‘through neck’ is very clever in that it simplifies the neck joint, eliminates the need for bracing, and creates a tailpiece through which the strings are attached. Try and find tailpiece hardware for a 3- or 4-string setup and I think you will agree that this is brilliant.

So let’s get started! Being that we chose to make our boxes from scratch, we were free to experiment with different timbers for their tone. Spanish Cedar is the choice of cigar boxes and is widely used in guitar construction. Stringed instruments typically have three different timber requirements for the optimal production of sound: the fingerboard, the soundboard, and the body; a dense hardwood, such as Ebony for the fingerboard; a light, resonant Spruce for the soundboard; and a medium hardwood, such as Maple, for the back, sides and neck. This is a formula that goes back for centuries. Simple substitutions are acceptable in this case, however these choices are as critical as your scale length.