What does my cigar box fiddle sound like?

 Keep in mind that I'm barely past Hot Cross Buns on the fiddle.  I'm not a competent player of what can be the most lovely and expressive instrument in the world.  But I am a guy who made this silly thing and wants to share it.  Just take it as an example of what a cigar box instrument sounds like.

 

Cigar Box Fiddle

 

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I love the idea of a musical instrument made from junk. My wife tolerates my interest. Nothing presented here is really new or particularly innovative. It is just me turning a cigar box into a playable fiddle.  If you are planning to do the same, I hope this provides inspiration and ideas.

My starting point is a cigar box I got in Arizona while visiting family. The wood is just a piece of scrap wood I had in the workshop. I’m not sure what kind of wood it even is, just something hard. I know it isn’t maple, birch, or cherry, but I don’t know what it is. The first step was creating a plan. Just a big piece of paper, trace the cigar box, and estimate the rest of the details.

I cut out the neck shape and another piece for the heel.

This is how they’ll go together.

Some basic shaping on the belt sander before glue-up.

Drilling the holes for the tuners before I get the neck too far. I’m just using guitar tuning machines. I could make friction pegs cheaper, but the guitar tuners are easy to use and easy to install. And I don’t need fine tuners.

To make the tuners accessible to the strings, I need to open up a slot in the head. I could try to chisel it out like a standard violin peghead, but this is so much easier. Drill a couple of 3/4” holes…

...and use a scroll saw to connect them.

This is how the tuners will be installed.

The cigar box is fairly sturdy, being solid wood with actual finger joints at the edges, but I don’t trust it to be sturdy enough to withstand the string tension. So, here are a couple of 5/16” poplar scraps I had in the shop. I’m going to glue them into the ends to give a little more rigidity.

Like so.

And a bass bar, made from scrap pine, can be glued to the soundboard (bottom of the cigar box) while the end reinforcements are still clamped up.

Once the glue is dry, I can make the sound holes. This is not my idea, but when I saw another cigar box fiddle with sound holes like this, I thought it was brilliant. I just used my belt sander with the 8” wheel to sand out big notches. This does two things. It allows for the sound to come out and it creates the effect of the side bouts, which normally form the waist in a standard violin. An arched bridge is needed to access one string at a time with the bow, but the bow needs to be at a fairly steep angle to the bridge when playing the highest or the lowest strings. The waist of the instrument allows the bow to touch the string at such an angle.

And it looks really cool with a lot less effort than carefully cutting out a standard f hole.

Before gluing the poplar reinforcements into the box, I drilled pilot holes for a couple of screws and also hollowed out the parts that I didn’t think needed extra strength. Here, you can see why I wanted the screw holes. I don’t trust glue alone to be enough to hold on the neck. A normal violin has a mortise cut into the block of wood at the top of the body so the neck has a mechanical joint as well as the glue to hold it. I’m just being lazy and using screws.

Time to finish up the shape of the neck and blend the heel in. This is a bit chunkier than my actual violin’s neck, but it didn’t seem that way when I was out in the shop working on it. Seemed really delicate at the time.

Finger board of maple. (I actually ended up using a different piece of maple for the finger board, but the process is as shown here.)  

Shaped at the sander to get the arched surface.

And here’s how it will fit on the neck.

Some time back, I turned a piece of scrap wood on my dad’s lathe to make end peg buttons for a different project. Here are 3 spares, one of which is going to be part of this fiddle.

I cut one off, drilled and countersunk a hole, and found a screw to attach it.

Attaching the neck. A very close observer will see that I didn’t actually use the planned screws. I drilled the pilot holes in the neck and heel just a little cockeyed and the screws wouldn’t work. I ended up redrilling them at 1/4” and putting in dowels instead. I hope it is strong enough. Anyway, just getting a clamp to hold the neck firmly in the right place was a bit of an adventure, but I ended up with a bar clamp doing the job pretty well.

The tailpiece!  I'll use the scroll saw to add little notches above the holes so the strings can sit in the notches and not pop out of the holes.  The tailgut is just going to be threaded through the two lower holes.

And here I’m estimating how high the bridge will sit. Way too low. There’s no way to access the strings with a bridge this low. I’d have to play all of them at once and that’s not what I want.

So more of that scrap poplar comes to the rescue! I made a wedge to sit under the finger board and raise the angle. Ordinarily, the neck is attached at an angle that allows for the strings to reach the bridge at the right height. I miscalculated the angle when I did this and I’m compensating with a wedge.

Gluing the box shut. The lid slides in grooves in the sides, rather than being hinged. With a good bit of wood glue, that lid isn’t going to slide ever again.

I used masking tape to cover the surface on the neck that will have the fingerboard and wedge glued to it. Then I wiped shellac over the body and head. I noted that violins normally have no finish on the neck where the musician holds it. This is because the lacquer is sort of grippy and it is hard to slide the hand to another position if there’s lacquer on the neck. I’m going to oil this wood later because I want the protection from dirt and hand oils, but the oil finish should allow for the hand to move as it needs to.

I put finish on the original stickers. Many cigar boxes have a lot more decorative paper on them, but I didn’t have one of the right size for a fiddle. In the future, perhaps I’ll get a box that will be covered with decorative paper like my cigar box jouhikko.

The bridge! A scrap of maple and a few minutes on the drill press and scroll saw.

Attaching the fingerboard. I had glued the wedge on to the fingerboard first.  It is starting to look like a fiddle!

Sound post! This serves to physically connect the top and back of the instrument. I’ve heard a couple of explanations for how it works to enhance the sound and both sound plausible. One says that this transmits vibrations to the back when the top vibrates. Thus, both the top and back of the instrument vibrate to contribute to the sound. The other explanation I heard says that this actually creates a relatively immobile point on the top, where the treble foot of the bridge (closest to the highest string) then rotates slightly to active the bass bar, which is below the lowest string. I don’t know which is more accurate or whether both are happening at once. I do know that a sound post in other instruments I’ve built makes a huge difference in both volume and tone.

I’m no expert on setting sound posts. Here’s my initial insertion with my pocket pliers.

And a tool made from scrap wire to adjust the placement.

Good enough for now.  Depending on the sound, I may have to adjust the location of this sound post to get better tone or volume.  Not that I expect much from a plywood soundboard in a cigar box that is essentially a waste product.  But we shall see.

A nut is made from scrap maple. It kind of matches the fingerboard. String grooves in the nut are made with a tiny file.

And here it is, all assembled! I used a set of the absolute cheapest violin strings on Amazon. I think I got half a dozen sets of strings for maybe $15. I’d be ashamed to show them to my daughter’s violin teacher. For this instrument, though, I’m not going to drop $50 on a set of strings when I have less than $20 in the rest of the instrument. Half of that is for the guitar tuners.

But tuning it showed me that there’s an issue with that tailpiece. It seemed like a great idea to drill holes that would let the ball ends of the strings drop through and then the string would fit into the little slot. Only the tension of the string caused the ball end to rotate up and out of the hole, so the strings wouldn’t stay put!

A new tailpiece took maybe 10 minutes to make.

And it is done. It sounds remarkably more violin-like than I imagined. Check back tomorrow for a really badly played sound sample.