Barrie resident Dave McQueen, who's retired and has built around 20 cigar-box guitars, shows just how easy constructing one could be if you put your mind and handiness to it.
McQueen shopped around for parts to use — a cigar box from Michaels, the best one-by-two-inch and quarter-inch oak he could find at Lowes, guitar tuners bought online, guitar strings and various other small parts — and away he went.
His material costs were minimal at the time: six bucks for the neck, five for the fretboard, 11 for the cigar box, and 10 for piezo crystals.
“I made the original pick-ups out of piezo crystals. You can get 10 of them for 10 bucks or something. They are basically your buzzer alarm in a clock radio, but they will also act as a pick-up,” says McQueen.
Total cost, he says, was around $50 or so to build a guitar.
He says they wouldn’t take very long to make — around a week.
Construction was fairly easy, according to McQueen.
