A friend of mine, Warren from this site, got hooked on CBGs a few months ago. I caught the bug from him.

My dad’s name is “Joe King”. He has had vanity plates that read “JOKER” on his car for as long as I can remember. I asked him if he had any old plates lying around. Not only did he have an old “JOKER” plate, but he also had my old Wisconsin vanity plates from back when I was in college. (I moved from Wisconsin to Chicagoland in 1981 and have lived there ever since.)

So I embarked on making TWO CBGs with the specific challenge sticking to the spirit of the instrument and keeping costs to a minimum by using as much stuff that I had already lying around as I could. I didn’t have any cigar boxes but I had a pile of scrap wood in my modest shop so I made a couple of boxes out of 1/2” plywood and 1/4” flooring underlayment for the top and back. The necks are 1X2” maple with a 1/4” aspen fingerboard to bring it up to the same height as the top of the body. The tailpiece holes are reinforced with pop rivets. I bought a couple of sets of enclosed guitar tuners on eBay from a Chinese seller for less than $20 shipped for BOTH sets. The quality of them is outstanding for the price! With a dozen tuners, I had enough for these two builds plus a retrofit to replace friction tuners on a resonator ukulele I have.

I bought a salvage Rogue amp from Musician’s Friend for $12.60 shipped.

http://guitars.musiciansfriend.com/product/Rogue-10W-1x6.5-Guitar-Combo-Amp?sku=620299

I stripped it for the parts – 5 pots, 5 knobs, 2 jacks, plus a bunch of other stuff for future projects (chrome cabinet corners, nice handle and hardware, power supply and cord, illuminated power switch, decent 6.5” 10W speaker that I resold to someone). I also had to buy a couple of those $2 piezo pickups at Radio Shack.

The finish is left over marine varnish from another project. The “faux frets” are 1/16” chrome automotive pinstripe. A 32’ roll of double stripe cost me $4.50 at NAPA. 64 FEET of faux frets – I think I’m set for a while.

The pinstripe came with a 1.5” X 3” piece of sample in the front of the pack to show the color. I used a paper punch to punch out some dot markers for the “L. KING” guitar. The markers on the “JOKER” guitar are stylized card suits downloaded from the internet, printed on address labels, sealed with clear packing tape, then cut out and applied.

Final cost came to around $20 per guitar.

I am amazed at both the resonated, unplugged sound and the amplified sound of these guitars. Very delta bluesy sounding. I was especially pleased that I did not have a feedback problem with the piezo pickups. It may be a result of not having any sound ports in the top of the guitar and having a double stick foam tape around the edge of the license plate. Anyway, I got lucky on that point.

So there’s my first (and second) CBG builds. Learned a lot. And had so much fun that I had to make a couple of accessories:

- My first bottleneck slide
- Picks made out of a Staples rebate card
- A stomp box made out of an Altoid tin (sounds surprisingly good too!)

I also bought 5/8” deep well socket on eBay to use as a steel slide so I wouldn’t have to cannibalize any of my working tool sets. Cost 99 cents.

Well, I have an empty 1-gallon mineral spirits can waiting in my shop for a can-jo project. I also have access to motorcycle plates so I see a CBU (Cigar Box Ukulele) in my future. But for now I have to take a break from building and get back to PLAYING!

Thanks to everyone on Cigar Box Nation for the inspiration!