The people at Signal Snowboards are well known not only for producing quality snowboards, but doing one-off builds out of unusual and perhaps questionable materials just to see what’s possible. From pennies to glass, if it can go on their press (and sometimes even if it can’t) they’ll build a snowboard out of it. At some point, they were challenged to build different types of boards from paper products which resulted in a few interesting final products, but this pushed them to see what else they could build from paper and are now here with an acoustic guitar fashioned almost entirely from cardboard.
For this build, the luthiers are modeling the cardboard guitar on a 50s-era archtop jazz guitar called a Benedetto. The parts can’t all just be CNC machined out of stacks of glued-up cardboard, though. Not only because of the forces involved in their construction, but because the parts are crucial to a guitar’s sound. The top and back are pressed using custom molds to get exactly the right shape needed for a working soundboard, and the sides have another set of molds. The neck, which has the added duty of supporting the tension of the strings, gets special attention here as well. Each piece is filled with resin before being pressed in a manner surprisingly similar to producing snowboards. From there, the parts go to the luthier in Detroit.
At this point all of the parts are treated similarly to how a wood guitar might be built. The parts are trimmed down on a table saw, glued together, and then finished with a router before getting some other finishing treatments. From there the bridge, tuning pegs, pickups, and strings are added before finally getting finished up. The result is impressive, and without looking closely or being told it’s made from cardboard, it’s not obvious that it was the featured material here.
Some of the snowboards that Signal produced during their Every Third Thursday series had similar results as well, and we actually featured a few of their more tech-oriented builds around a decade ago like their LED snowboard and another one which changes music based on how the snowboard is being ridden.
Building an electric guitar is easy. As long as the strings have the correct length and tension, it works.
There are lots of steps in building an acoustic guitar that sounds good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmDAIlEGO_Q
Once that cardboard is placed into presses with resin and cures, it in a sense becomes plywood (it’s not veneers and glue but the process is similar for molding with ply). They also say the neck is mainly resin and the paper is a binder. That will require maintenance over time to reduce friction, likely. Resin though – wonder how it would do over time with pressure. Hardwood is chosen normally for guitars because the stress over time from string tension will warp them otherwise.
Also the type of wood makes a difference in the sound. Curious what it sounds like without the pickups, because that can make a world of difference even on shoddy guitars. Plus with all the work they did…. couldn’t you have just built it out of something like mesquite or cedar? Ranchers will beg you to trash that stuff.
All in all, the build is impressive and I like that they had the gumption to try cardboard. Also, many hardwoods are becoming more scarce and take longer to source. I just think it’s wasted energy personally making it from cardboard (plus they had to use resin,. luthier tools and other things most folk don’t have). I guess the journey was what was important.
It’s not a good way to build a guitar, but it’s a great hack.
i tried to imagine how to accomplish this with cardboard, which can be astonishingly strong if the geometry is favorable. roughly, it needs to be under compression in one axis, or tension in the other, and never bending forces. That’s why corrugation and honeycombing work so well. But i couldn’t shake the suspicion that anything like that would have awful acoustic properties. I decided on my own that the only way to actually do it would be to make the guitar out of a composite, where all the desirable qualities come from the resin rather than from the cardboard. Then i read the article and i’m not sure whether i’m happy that they agreed with me :)
Yeah, this isn’t made from cardboard, it’s made from resin.
At this point, with all the effort they put in, they may has well have made a cigar-box banjo. Probably close on sound quality and a faster build with less tools.
I also noticed that. All of their recordings were using pickups, not raw acoustic sound. Also the neck is largely resin they said, with cardboard as binder. Probably the action of moving your hand along the frets gets sticky after a while.
full cardboard acoustic guitar is on my list. exactly after the folding one:)
10 IF ther is enough money/time THEN
20 PRINT foldable / cardboard acoustic guitar
30 SIT DOWN under palm AND PLAY with sounds of waves