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Today I finished my first cigar box bass: four string, fretless, short scale 30". The neck is a sandwich of hard maple and walnut, and the fretboard is walnut. I used a tiny knot on the fretboard as the octave marker. Neck is finished with spray lacquer; fretboard is finished with oil & beeswax. 

The Mark Twain cigar box would have benefitted from a piezo pickup because it was pretty cool, but I sprayed it with several coats of lacquer and tried to keep Twain's face intact at least. The cigars weren't bad, by the way ... 

It's a through neck, and the bridge--a regular bass bridge--is screwed directly into it through the top. 

I had to remove the hinges to fit the lid directly down onto the neck. I also glued filler blocks to the neck inside the box to help balance the bass a little ... though it's still neck-heavy. 

Sounds pretty good to me, but I don't play bass, much less fretless. I'm looking forward to hearing my friend play it when he takes possession. 

Ask any questions ... 

Billy Wise test piloting the electric banjola, Joan Kirkham on the guitar, and Myself on the Washtub.

 Guess this is the best place to start a progress thread so here we go.

 I've been wanting to build a CBG for quite awhile now, past attempts to find boxes were futile but I now have found a box supplier near me :D

 I found this selection of boxes, found  this site of course and started watching tutorials on You Tube.

(I was hoping to find one cool box and walked out with 7, yikes!)

 Going to start with the Hoyo de Monterrey and have almost everything I need to follow Unstrung13's tutorial. Hopefully I'll be on that within a few days. It seemed to be the simplest tutorial so I figured the best place to start.

 Of course the Brickhouse needs to be a Bass :D (which is my main goal for this endeavor. I'll make that one electric and get a few nice parts (gold volume knob) and tuners from CBNG.

 My favorite though is the Chillin' Moose'. Sweet little box, but it's small so I figure probably more of a Uke scale, definitely electric, probably piezo.

 I think I'll try a stomp box with the baccarat, though I'll probably use it more as a 'slap box'.

 I'd like to turn the Romeo into an amp, but I'm getting ahead of my self. 

 I'll post some pics of progress and or finished g when it's ready :) 

Here's the tub, its 18" in diameter

Here's the tub with the sound board anchors in place

Sound board ready for mounting and paint

The neck glueing, it will be red oak with maple

....stay tuned!

Sound board base coated, penciled in design...ready for 3D paint

Now the sound board is ready for paint.....

Almost where I want it too be

Neck Brace

Yeah I tried to shortcut my way into CBGs. But the world had other ideas and I missed out on both the CBGs on ebay I considered getting. I used to have an old kids bass guitar I got given maybe 20 years ago and the last time I saw it was on the basement wall. Hmmm. There's a bookcase there now.

I removed top few shelves of books and tilted the bookshelf and sure enough the guitar was still there on the wall. A bit of gymnastics stood on a stool, tilting a bookshelf and I managed to grab the top tuner and lift it out over the bookshelf.

Not too bad considering I hadn't seen it for at least 10 years. I cleaned it up and plugged it into an amp. It worked, well sorta. I removed the strings, cranked the bridge up as high as it would go and stuck on 2nd to 5th strings from an Adagio light gauge set. I tuned to open G (GDGB) and spent the next couple of hours having fun playing. Only one pickup was working, and the sound would cut out and crackle - fixable for a bit with a thump. The pots are noisy but work. All that aside, it sounded surprising good - far better than it did with bass strings.

So all in all, I think I have the perfect donor for parts for my first CBG build. The scale is 23 3/4" and with the tail and bridge both being surface mounted, the major work will be mounting the neck (with a new higher nut) and fixing the electronics. I can't wait for my boxes (I'm getting 3 random ones) to arrive so I can pick one and get cracking.