My first post here and I thought I would give my (sometimes painful) lessons learned on building my first 3 CBGS. I will do as separate posts so this is called CBG#1. No doubt most, if not all have been done to death elsewhere but the more data the better?

Apart from current ( in-progress) build, all my necks are made from Oak - I am struggling to find a lighter hardwood in my area atm. Where I used wound pickup, these were a job lot from eBay ( 5 or 6 for around £10 ). I also have only just acquired a couple of real cigar boxes ( Struggling to find in UK other than expensive ones on eBay), so only CBG#3 (later post) has a 'real' cigarbox sound box.

CBG #1 

Description

• No fretboard or scarf joint
• Neck-through design
• Plywood box ( from 'The Works' in UK - £4 )
• Wound pickup
• Closed tuners
• Shaped  neck using a block plane
• Decorated with famous cigar smokers (Churchill and Groucho!)
• Shotgun cartridge tuner/volume controls
• I used disassembled pop rivets to protect wood on tailpiece being worn by string tension.
• Decorative soldering iron bits used to burn fret markers.
• Wood varnish finish all over
• Cut sound hole trims from soda bottles

Lessons Learned

• Not having a scarf joint requires a much thicker blank to start ( mine was only 20mm ). This meant the tension on the string drop Nut->Tuner was too slack. Had to add a 'tensioning bar' to correct ( See second image )
• I made the neck way too wide ( 45 mm ). For the 3 strings to be 25 mm apart ( seems to be around the perceived wisdom on the subject ) Access for playing from the sides , and even barring chords, was more difficult.
• Pop rivets worked great but best to hot glue them in.
• Block plane is not ideal for neck shaping. I subsequently acquired a spokeshave
• Distance from tailpiece to saddle too great, giving a shallow angle and low tension ( again!). This is primarily due to me not having a fretboard, so the saddle must sit low on the sound box to get a good low action. I added 'hold-down' screws behind the saddle to improve and this worked fine.
• Decoration - I made the mistake of shading my graphics in with permanent marker rather than acrylic paint. When I added varnish it acted as a solvent and caused bleeding - Acrylic in future!

CBG #2 (Beatles tribute)

Description

• Second attempt much improved -  (maple) fretboard over oak neck,  AND scarf joint
• Used a CBG specific adjustable bridge 
• Simple sound holes cut with aluminium mesh hot glued underneath
• Side dots using 1.5 mm plastic rods (China/eBay) 
• 'C' shape neck profile achieved by spokeshave

Lessons Learned ( over first build )

• Scarf joint is worth the effort, Table saw made a reasonable job using a homemade (14 degrees) jig after studying a few YouTube clips (e.g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrFbVYtH0qo)
• Sound holes - Used a slow turning flat bit and results were remarkably smooth considering it is  a plywood box (again!). Hot-glued aluminium mesh underneath holes,  to stop foreign bodies entering the box!
• Decoration - I created high contrast versions of Paul and John from stock photos, then drew onto the box using a tracing app called Projector ( iOS only sadly) - Coloured using acrylic.
• Finished using Danish oil - Much prefer this to varnish, and quicker to get multiple coats on than tung oil
• Adjustable bridge is probably only really worth buying if you want to have quite varied string densities I e.g Low E , D, and high E. Otherwise reasonable  intonation gained from a standard bridge/saddle. But happy with the results. NOTE - If using this type of bridge I STRONGLY recommend viewing Chickenbone John's clip on this first. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB4b1X00vXQ
• Guitar sounds great - Though i guess my amp contributes much of the quality!