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Planning my first box guitar - Please review and advice!

I'm new to the box guitar building world, I do have woodworking experience.
Just started designing and planning the guitar.

Can someone run through the plans to check if I'm overlooking stuff or done my research wrong. :)
Please inform me, I'm here to learn before starting my first build because I know I'm going to learn from all the "mistakes" during the building process..

I'm planning to use oak for the neck and looking into wood for the box at this moment.

The plans are available for download (pdf) below. BTW the plans are in mm because I'm from the Netherlands.

New version
Thanks to the great suggestions, I've made some changes to the plans V1.1 is now available!
Made some changes to:

Positioning of the box
Support blocks inside the box
Added fret positions (via stewmac.com)
Added a volume knob to the setup

For the people who want to compare the versions, V1.0 is still available for download as PDF

v1.1

3 members like this

Attachments:

hans-coppens_box-guitar_v1.pdf, 128 KB
hans-coppens_box-guitar_v2.pdf, 145 KB

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Permalink Reply by Southern Ray on March 31, 2021 at 9:00pm

"Everything else .. you've already over-thought ;-)"

Ha! Pick, whadaya wanna bet he's an engineer?

Welcome, Hans. I had to kid, my Dad's a retired engineer. You're gonna love building these things.

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Permalink Reply by Hans Coppens on April 1, 2021 at 1:37am

You lost your bet! I'm a software designer.. hahaha But studied architecture in college.. My father was an architect and we were always building stuff together. I inherited his woodworking tools and I'm going to use these tools to build my guitar.

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Permalink Reply by Hans Coppens on April 1, 2021 at 1:32am

Thank you for the placement advice! I'll mock up the setup first as you suggested.
I've adjusted the positioning of the box and refined the blocks inside the box to give some more room for resonation.

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Permalink Reply by BrianQ. on March 31, 2021 at 9:03pm

Hans, there’s some good reading for beginning builders in the Resources tab located towards the top of the page, as well as the cigarboxguitar.com archive located at the bottom right of the page. Also Glenn Watt YouTube channel has some really simple build vids too? Check out this article: https://www.cigarboxguitar.com/knowledge-base/how-to-make-a-simple-...

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Permalink Reply by Hans Coppens on April 1, 2021 at 1:41am

I'm probably reading for the next 10 years, so many resources I found. :) Thank you for adding some more. :)

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Permalink Reply by Rooster on April 2, 2021 at 11:52am

Someone may have already pointed this out, but looking at both designs the weakest point in your build would be just behind the neck pickup where you are taking out a lot of wood. Even on a 3 sting guitar the strings will put more upward pressure on the neck then people realize. The longer the scale and heavier the strings the more pressure will be pulling on the neck. I would keep the thickness of the heel board all the way back. Richie Kay has a post on here showing a neck build very close to your design. I generally will run the neck and heel board the full length of the box on my builds and add blocks under the heel block if I need to take up space for mounting the neck. You can also use different thickness blocks to add a back angle to your neck if you wish by putting a taller block in back. Other then that I think your design looks great. Can't wait to see the finished product ;-)