2010 Challenge, Week 24: Cigar Box Guitar (part 2)

So, when last I left you, Dear Reader, you were hanging by a thread wondering what was wrong with the cigar box guitar. It certainly looked fine, and it was nearly playable, and I suppose I could have stopped there. But it would have been half-assed, and even though half-assed is often good enough for me, in this case it wasn’t. I wanted a real playable instrument.

Here were the problems as of Sunday night:

The action (which is how high the strings are off the neck) was way too high, rendering it very difficult to play.
The strings would not stay in tune. I quickly discovered that this was because the tension from the strings was pulling the bridge loose. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of this.
The electrics weren’t working. I bought some parts from Radio Shack and attempted to follow the directions for installing them, but when I plugged it into my amp, I just got a lot of feedback and no actual sound from the strings.

More after the jump, keep reading…

A Bridge Too Far: I don’t know how many of you are familiar with “action” on stringed instruments, but here’s a look at the action on Rev. 1 of the CBG:

The flash from the camera kind of mess up the focus, but you can see the strings were easily 1/4″ off the neck. Here’s what that means for anyone who hasn’t played a stringed instrument: it’s like impossible to hold the string down and get a decent sound out of it. It’s harder on your fingers and it quickly becomes frustrating to play. So that had to get fixed.

The bridge I scavenged from the toy ukelele was too tall, and although it was screwed in place and glued down, the tension from the strings was gradually pulling it loose. This caused it to go out of tune instantly.

So clearly the bridge had to go, since it was causing two of my three problems. I decided to replace it with two parts — a new bridge (this time I used a chopstick cut down to size), and a separate tailpiece to anchor the strings down, similar to the way it was done in the original Instructable. They used a hinge for this piece, but they’re also only using three strings, and I really wanted four for some reason.

A similar Instructable by a user named Discontinuity used a small scrap of copper sheeting for his, and that seemed more up my alley. My first try was using the aluminum from an empty can of Starbucks Double Shot (which seemed a little tougher than a regular soda can). Alas, when tightening up the strings, the aluminum gave way. Same problem in this picture with the flash and the focus, but it should give you a rough idea:

However — I don’t know if you can tell from the picture, but replacing the bridge with the chopstick did wonders for the action. It’s actually better action than on my Yamaha acoustic. Without a decent tailpiece to anchor the strings, though, it’s not possible to tune the guitar. Back to the drawing board.

Meanwhile: still working away feverishly on the electronics. You can see the output jack in that picture above — according to all the tutorials, this is a really simple thing to do, you just wire up what’s called a piezo buzzer (Radio Shack, three bucks) to an output jack, plug it into an amp and bingo, you’re all electified and stuff.

Alarmingly, the words “soldering iron” accompanied these directions for the piezo buzzer in most cases. I don’t own a soldering iron. They frighten me. My boss at work brought his in and offered to help out with the soldering, but as it turns out, I bought the wrong kind of piezo buzzer anyway, and it wasn’t connecting properly to the jack, and all that came out of the amp was a loud hummy kind of feedback.

And this marks the only concession to defeat that I made in this project. Some future date, maybe I will revise the pickup and get the guitar electrified. But for now, I’m willing to give up that portion in favor of having a working acoustic model.

So — back to the tailpiece. Tonight I stopped at Orchard Supply Hardware to purchase a thin sheet of brass. Stronger than the aluminum from the can, but still flexible and bendy. This is it, I told myself — the final piece of the puzzle, this is the last step and then I’ll be all finished!

Here’s the tailpiece:

You may notice one of the strings is broken. Spoiler.

Yeah, so I ran into some trouble stringing it up. Here’s something you might not know — stringing a guitar takes some patience. Patience is something I’d kind of run out of by this time. I broke three strings trying to get the thing strung and tuned properly. With no spares left, I had to settle for three strings tonight.

A few improvements I have planned for the future: Replace the tuning pegs. As happy as I was to get some cheapies from the toy ukelele (tuning pegs are expensive!), they are plastic and low quality, which made the tuning process a huge headache. Also, at some point down the road I want to get the electrics sorted out. But for not, it plays all right. Here is a poorly-centered video to give you an idea of the sound: