Obligatory (nearly) finished pic first. (It's still missing tuners and strings in this shot.) Took about seven weeks from beginning to end. No idea how many total hours. 150? 200?
I drink a lot of soda. I also like to recycle. Cans are easy, but the boxes I have to bring to a place, so I like to wait until I have a decent amount. But I also like to procrastinate. I checked one day and realized I had something like eighty boxes flat packed in our junk room and thought, "I must utilize this resource."
Back in college I saw an art project where a kid essentially made a log from old newspapers and wood glue, and when he milled it down into boards, it had a sort of natural-looking grain made of like text and comics and shit. I knew this would work with this kind of card stock, but I didn't know what to make from it. I was thinking maybe a chair or something until I stumbled across a video from a custom guitar maker called Wunnadem. And somehow from that I made the leap to, "Oh! I can make a guitar out of soda boxes."
It made sense to me at the time I swear.
This was the first piece I made as a kind of proof-of-concept. You fully open up and flatten your boxes using little dots of masking tape to hold all the little perforations together, spread a layer of glue with a putty knife, slap on the next layer, repeat, then press it flat with all the weights you own for about a day. This first seven-ply sheet ended up becoming the back panel.
Speaking of all the weights I own, here's that first piece pressed between the cornhole boards I made for my housemates' engagement party. This is 130 lbs of wearable weights because I grew up watching DBZ while learning taekwondo (RIP knees). Subsequent pieces would also be pressed with the stack of dumbbell plates I forgot we had in the garage.
This is my body contour. I wasn't sure how to go about setting this up 'cause there's a lot of ever-so-slightly different body shapes among acoustic guitars, but in the end I just calculated a few edges based on the golden ratio and just winged it. Or wung it. Idunno.
A possible alternate contour based on a Coke bottle. I'm glad I didn't commit to this.
The second and third pieces I ever made. The bottom one became the neck and headstock. The top one became the neck block and several other internal supports and actually ended up splitting about a third of the way through. They were each made with about fifty-five layers of caffeine-free Diet Coke boxes all facing the same way.
The table saw struggled a little to get through this stuff sometimes. It's a little like working with MDF board that's just slightly damp. But I ended up with a totally decent paper piece of 2x4.
In the course of hastily slathering pieces with glue and slapping them onto the stack, I failed to keep the layers perfectly flat, which means I succeeded in producing this funky grain pattern after sanding the wavy side flat.
Gluing on the pieces that would form the base of the neck. The bottom left block is just there for moral support. And physical support. Probably mostly physical.
These pieces were going to become the bridge. I figured the holes needed to be precisely cut so I was going to measure and cut each strip individually then glue them all together. Turns out to be a much bigger pain in the ass to clamp pieces this small together than to just git gud at drilling holes. But a test piece for this process later became the part of the headstock that the strings slot into, hilariously known as 'the nut.'
For the top panel (or Sound Board™), I decided I wanted a mirrored wood grain-like pattern. This involved cutting a couple hundred half inch strips of various sodas and seltzers, sorting them into two mirrored stacks, and gluing them onto a full flat box one at a time. It was probably the tensest and most time-consuming session of gluing shit to itself I've ever experienced. I mean, I went to random.org to put together the order of the colors. I also wanted them to have a slight curve but decided a straight taper was close enough.
A common problem with sawing through this stuff is that it gunks up your saw teeth. I had to keep stopping to pick these little lumps out. I guess maybe if you go too fast, the friction heats up the plastic in the printed side and partially melts it, maybe it just wasn't 100% dry, idunno. I got through it though.
To create the bend of the headstock, I sliced off the end at an angle with a Japanese pull saw, then glued the resulting wedge onto the back. It was a little tricky to sand because you have to go across the grain to avoid prying the layers apart, but I was ultimately pleased with the result.
These were the pieces that ended up becoming the internal bracing of the body. They're about an inch wide by three-eighths thick. I ended up bisecting them lengthwise and only using like a third of them.
Rough cut of the neck and headstock. Jokes about fingering A minor will get you suspended.
The neck served as proof that you can get some cool grain shapes with this process, so I decided I wanted something like that on the fretboard. I glued a series of strips to a 4" PVC pipe to produce a piece with curved layers (like you'd find in an actual log) and then tried to mill it flat. I ended up messing it up a little too badly to make a fretboard, but a surviving chunk later became my bridge blank.
I tried finding a shitty guitar at a thrift store to steal tuning machines from but only found a shitty violin. Then suddenly everything was closed, so I looked into ordering a set online and found StewMac. Turns out they sell entire would-be guitars, so I also bought a truss rod and some fretwire. I initially thought I'd make frets myself out of soda cans and epoxy and I'm really glad I changed my mind about that.
This was my second attempt at a curved fretboard piece that came out much better thanks to better clamping and significantly more careful, patient handsawing. This piece was also assembled with Titebond 3 so it would be a little bit harder.
I tried my damnedest to saw through this thing straight and flat, but it just wasn't happening. I should probably own a bandsaw at this point, but as yet I do not.
The rough cut of the above piece. Doesn't get much rougher than this.
Same piece after a couple hours of planing and sanding, It's still not perfectly flat, but it's getting there.
Here's an early shot of the headstock after I had finally settled on a shape and proportions.
To make the sidewall of a guitar body, you need a jig. You essentially have to build the whole body in negative so you can clamp pieces to it. Enter a 2' by 4' by ½" sheet of oriented strand board.
The main panels of my body jig. I clamped them together and cut them at the same time using our little Black & Decker reciprocating saw.
We just happened to have a 2" square dowel to make corners from. I wanted the body to be 3-1/2" wide and my top and back panels came out 5/32" each, so this jig is 3-3/16" deep. With the table saw, this step took less than an hour.
I cut these notches so the little C clamps I had would be able to reach the inside of the upper... lobe? of the body.
To make the sidewall, I started by making a two-layer strip, piece by piece, until it was longer than the perimeter of the body. Then I taped that piece to the inside the jig and glued the next six layers into that one by one.
Here we see the front and back panels cut roughly to shape, the neck with the headstock shaped and the truss rod channel started, the neck block with the truss channel slot cut, the strings I got from Guitar Center, and other bits and bobs as well.
It took a lot of sanding before I decided my would-be fretboard was ready for prime time. Double sided mirror shot to prove that it is not in fact a piece of wood, just in case there's still some doubt.
The front panel tried to curl up on me even more fiercely than the back panel. It took a shocking amount of time leaving it pressed to get it to stay flat. It made me want to scream. Musical guest: Edvard Munch.
I had no idea if this would work until I did it. To mill the fretboard blank into a flat quarter-inch sheet, once I got one side sanded flat, I just taped it to a bigger piece of wood and ran the whole thing over our table saw.
It was a bit of a struggle with the saw blade trying to kick off some of the edge bits that weren't fully adhered, but I was able to get through it. I couldn't raise the saw enough to do it in one pass, so I just ran it through from both sides and then finished the cut with my pull saw.
Voila: a pseudowood board with a realistic grain shape.
And this is exactly the effect I was hoping for from this absurd process: wood grain with nutrition data.
To prevent the neck from bowing under the tension of the strings, most guitars have a metal truss rod inside it that pulls in the other direction and can be tightened or loosened by finagling a hex screwdriver into the sound hole. Routing out this channel required scoring the edge as deeply as I could then going at it with our underpowered router.
Only having this low power multi tool router to work with actually kind of helped because it took longer to cut through which made it easier to be precise. But it also kind of sucked because it took longer to cut through.
The eight layers of the sidewall, glued and dried. I ended up only clamping it at the top and bottom and just using masking tape to hold the rest of it in place.
Much has been written about the best ways to brace the sound board of a guitar, how the bracing pattern affects the sound, et cetera. I ended up just copying that asymmetric Martin X style.
The curved piece that didn't make it to the fretboard made for a wonderfully solid bridge blank. This piece was the winner of the 'most likely to be mistaken for actual wood by some rando' prize.
When normal people make guitars from normal materials, they take a trangular dowel and repeatedly slice most of the way through one edge to make this flexible reinforcement that you glue to the inside edge of the body. I, being a crazy person, cut each of these little wedges out by hand using a dovetail saw.
The front-side assembly.
Bracing for the back panel is also necessary but much less important to the sound. I didn't like doing a boring right angle lattice, so I slapped this together. I really like it and I'm not sure why.
The headstock with pilot holes drilled and a single tuner test fit. The grain I got as a result of that angled cut was really encouraging.
The front-side assembly and back panel moments before being glued.
And moments after being clamped.
I knew I needed a slightly harder material to make both the nut (don't) and the saddle, which is the part of the bridge that the strings actually lay across. I did it by soaking the strips in a mixture of Titebond III wood glue and water then clamping it as hard as I could using my table clamp and some hardwood scraps for about a day and a half. There was a little warping to contend with as it dried, but the result was a very hard little strip of paper.
It's probably not the correct way to go about it, but I glued on the fretboard before I really started shaping the neck so they'd be flush the whole time.
The body assembled. It still needed to be trimmed and sanded, but it already had a promising sound to it when I banged on it.
The intention was always to sand the top flat so the brown of the bare cardboard would show between the colorful printed sides. I now wish I had done that part before cutting it out and gluing it together when it was still just a flat sheet.
Oddly enough, the best tool for cutting through these boxes was a box cutter, right up until it slipped and slashed my thumb in half. I probably should've gone to a hospital for stitches and I absolutely would have if there wasn't a plague on. I used some elastic bandages to pinch it shut with limited success and then put superglue over it when the bleeding had stopped. It's mostly healed now, but a tiny spot on the nailward side of the wound is still slightly numb. So that's fun.
My Dremel drill press was invaluable for most of this project, cutting the various holes and slots in the bridge would've just been straight up impossible without it.
Sanding the fretboard required me to get creative with my clamp situation.
The beginning of shaping the neck and the emergence of that X O grain pattern.
Welcome to the beginning of the shaping of the base of the neck of the guitar of cardboard of mine. Done with a combination of Japanese pull saw, coping saw, and the belt sander which this project forced me to finally go out and buy. And Home Depot had started restricting occupancy, so I had to stand on line outside until the 'bouncer' (i.e. the fattest guy in the store) got word from the much skinnier guy at the exit that someone had left. Once inside, the only clue that the world was ending was everybody wearing masks. It was a novel experience.
The grain pattern that came out on the bridge was really wild and I'm still really pleased with it.
Further shaping of the neck. It honestly still needs to be rounded out a little, especially near the base, but it's decent.
I actually attached the neck completely wrong. You're supposed to slot it into the body with a kind of dovetail joint, which is why there's a neck block in the first place. I ended up just drilling holes and making a dowel. But I did make the dowel using existing scraps of pseudowood.
To calculate the frets, I googled 'fret calculator,' which turned up some arcane shit called "Förster resonance energy transfer," so then I googled 'acoustic fret calculator' and turned up a minimal little Java form where you plug in your scale length (the distance from nut to saddle {don't}) and the number of frets you want, and it spits out an old school HTML table with lengths in thousandths of an inch. I used this to make and print a template at 300 dpi. I'm sure I could've just downloaded a template somewhere, but they'd probably want money first.
My nut. (Stop.) This was made using the same wet clamp technique as the saddle above. (Seriously, grow up.)
The stain ended up not really showing on the printed side of the layers which made that artificial grain really pop.
Testing the fret situation on a scrap piece. Fret wire has a T-shaped cross section. The bottom of the T is the part you hammer into the fretboard and this dovetail saw ended up being the exact same width as that part of my wire.
The neck and fretboard with channels cut.
And the back side of the neck all shaped and smoothed.
Loogiddiss neck. S'beautiful.
The little dots on the fretboard denote harmonic frets (where you can just touch the string at that point and it'll keep ringing at a higher interval). These are normally made out of some pearlescent resin shit. Mine came in standard Diet Coke silver.
We didn't have a hole punch that size, either; I had to cut them sombitches out by hand one at a time.
The neck. Dotted, fretted, and nutted. (I swear to god...) Installing frets is absurdly easy. You just hammer it in, clip off the excess, and file the end smooth.
I didn't really look into how the edge strip is normally done, but I was able to use the same router to cut just one cardboard layer deep. Again, having kind of a weak motor made it easier to cut precisely.
I think this is about where we came in. Neck's attached and fretted, bridge is placed and glued down, the edge strip is on there, it's almost a guitar.
I slapped a couple coats of polyurethane over the whole thing to seal it. I actually kinda hated the way the front looked when it was wet. It got a little better when fully dry. And looking at it again now, this specific photo doesn't look terrible.
The headstock with all the tuners installed. I REALLY like the way this grain looks with the stain on it. Using a fret to simulate the rim of the can was my buddy's idea.
Man I love me some hexagons.
I wasn't a hundred percent sure the holes I had drilled into the bridge actually connected until I was done shoving strings through them.
Upon stringing it, I found a catastrophic flaw: the action is way too deep. It wasn't the neck bowing under tension, it was the entire structure bowing slightly, plus I had made both my nut and my saddle too high. (Get out.)
It won't be easy, but this is all fixable.
But I had a temporary solution: slap a capo on the second fret and tune it like that. This ended up being fine for the low frets but quickly went off tune above the seventh or eighth. BUT! The twelfth fret harmonic was exactly where it should be over the twelfth fret. So I knew at least my fret placement was correct.
For a more permanent solution, I took the strings off and steamed the entire guitar body in my shower for about thirty minutes, then laid weights on it to bend it back for a few hours, which worked but not quite well enough alone, so I took out the belt sander and thinned down the nut and the saddle then smoothed and reapplied polyurethane to the bare edges. This also helped, but the action is still uncomfortably deep. I can take the strings off again and repeat the whole process, and I swear to god I will do exactly that someday, but for right now I need to be done with this project. I mean, seven weeks, dude.
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