Yesterday I got to put some major components together and get something that looked like a Cigar Box Guitar!  

I failed to order the necessary internal electronic parts - jack, volume pot - in a timely fashion, so although I've got my piezo rod pickup in stock I'll have to wait for Monday's mail before I can put in the rest of the internal parts and fasten the box shut.

Course, along the way I had to make one rather serious blunder.  Can you tell what it is from the following pic?

Yup.  That's right.  I laid out the peg head from the back and instead of putting two up, one down, I put one up, two down.  D@mn dyslexia.   I'm using Shane Speal tuning machines here that come in sets of three. Fortunately I had bought several sets of tuning machines, so I went into another set and traded out the one I had for the one I needed.  

I haven't laid the resulting cannibalized set out and looked at them, but I'm thinking what I did means I'll have a set of three all the same.  I guess I'll be making a Fender-style peg head on a guitar pretty soon.

Besides gluing up the neck to the box and the fret board and little oak trim piece to the neck stub below the box to the neck, and clamping them all for several hours, I started work on the bridge.  

I'll be using a rod piezo pickup on this build. I'll probably standardize on them so I bough a 10 - pack from Gitty.

But back to the bridge. I'm not all that happy with my design ideas on this so far.  I'm happy with the rod piezo part, picked one out and cut it down to 4 strings wide, which will still give me room for a bridge wider than I need for my 3 strings.  I just think that I made the wood portion of it much more complicated than it needs to be, and I'm not happy with the way I laid out the metal portion of it.  More progress on it today maybe.

I haven't started on the nut yet, but my mental picture of the nut is stone simple.  A small piece of red oak, rectangular in section, long grain across the neck, small notches for the strings, and upper (peg head) end rounded down.  I don't anticipate much difficulty in executing it.  Then make the holes to feed the strings through.

I'm pretty pleased with the progress so far.