It all started when I was disassembling the last pieces of a parade float we had built a few years ago so our grand kids could ride in a parade. The float resembled a steam boat and there were two oak spacers between the smoke stacks. I could not bring myself to throw away the two pieces of oak. They looked as if they would make good cigar box guitar necks. I like the idea of making something from found stuff and junk from around the garage and house. The original oak pieces were sawn from a junk oak shelf. To see the two oak pieces acting as spacers between the smoke stacks, check out the following steam boat video.
Some pieces I am using are not junk and found stuff. The tuning machines, cigar boxes, strings, and bridges were purchased from Amazon and CB +Gitty. If a traditional three string instrument is being built, you might as well build two and buy a regular set of 6 tuning machines. I am building two. I do not have the patience or skill to build a fretted neck so the two instruments will be slide only. The distance from bridge to the nut ( the nut is really a bolt ) is 25″. Each instrument has two piezo pickups, a disk type on the sound board and a rod type in a ukulele stile bridge. See the schematic below. After reading Merlin Blencowe’s preamp book and discussing things on the AX84 Forum. I learned that Piezos should look into at least 10 Megs. So the preamp will have an input impedance of 15 meg. and a voltage gain of 10.
| Baritone on left, tenor on right.Units are tuned and playable as acoustics, but no electronics installed at this time. | ||
For lack of better names, one CBG will be called a baritone, and the other a tenor. The cigar boxes are slightly different in shape, both were rapped with a knuckle and the one with lowest sounding thump became the baritone. The strings used on the baritone are regular guitar strings. The tuning is:
G2 97.999 cps.
D3 146.83 cps
G3 196.00 cps
For the G2 string a regular guitar E2 string was tuned up to G2, For D3 and G3 The regular guitar strings were tuned as they would be on a guitar
The tuning for tenor is:
G3 196 cps
D4 293.665 cps
G4 391.995 cps
This tuning range is too high for regular guitar strings especially the G4 so a special set by Southbound String Co was purchased from CB Getty.
Long Rope Ranch 
