Luthier Crafts Guitar From Cardboard

March 27, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

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.

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A walnut ukulele with an aluminum piece routing strings at it's base which is facing the camera. The neck of the instrument extends away from the viewer and is held at an angle by a hand with striped sheets in the background.

Travel Uke From A Fallen Tree

December 12, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 6 Comments

When faced with what to build from the trimmings of the walnut tree in her yard, [Amy Qian] decided to build a headless travel ukulele. [via MAKE:]

Headless instruments relocate the tuners to the body of the instrument, and [Qian] had to do a fair bit of trimming and whittling on the body to make the tuners fit just right and still be operable via four scoops cut into the sides. After some initial troubles with the amount of friction on the strings produced by the mandrel, she replaced it with a set of ball bearings and a holder she machined out of aluminum.

We love how [Qian]’s extensive build log goes through the entire process of making this diminutive instrument from trimming dead walnut branches to building a playable instrument. Little details like the maple strip in the neck and the cocobolo accents really take this far beyond the cigar box instruments that start many down the path of luthiery.

Looking for more musical hacks? How about this set of Commodore 64s turned into an accordion or this Baguette Theremin?

Some Strings Attached: Electric Tenor Guitar Built From Scratch

May 1, 2020 by Sven Gregori 4 Comments

It’s no secret that we have a soft spot for musical instruments here at Hackaday, especially for the weird and unusual ones. An instrument that definitely fits the unusual category is the four-string tenor guitar, which — as legend has it — originated back in the 1920s by frankensteining a banjo neck and a guitar body together. Despite being around for almost a century, they’re still rarely found outside some niche genres, which makes them an excellent choice when pursuing a unique sound experience. As someone looking for exactly that, [Ham-made] decided to build an electric tenor guitar entirely from scratch, and documented every step of it at great length.

Built from two random chunks of wood, a dissected single coil pickup, and a leftover piece of elk antlers, the result is even more unique than the sound experience itself. While the rather unorthodox, faceted body shape leaves no doubt that this is a handmade instrument, the real eye-catcher has to be the neck and its oddly spaced frets. Counting the frets, the math doesn’t seem to add up either, as the twelfth fret usually creates the octave, and as such should be at half the scale length (i.e. half the string’s length from the bridge at the body’s end to the nut at the neck’s end). Turns out that [Ham-made] went for a diatonic scale instead of the usual chromatic one, essentially leaving out the notes you anyway wouldn’t play in a standard Pop or Rock setup. Using an all-fifths tuning akin to cellos and mandolins, this will work nicely over all four strings.

Aesthetics are certainly a subjective matter, and [Ham-Made] is fully aware that people might feel downright offended by his creation, but as he also wants to “embrace mistakes and promote experimentation”, he encourages everyone with similar aspiration to simply go for it — and he’s certainly no stranger to unconventional instruments and recording equipment. But before the never-tiring tonewood debate sparks up, check out this scrap metal guitar.

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Engineering Meets Craftsmanship In This Guitar Fretting Jig

April 27, 2016 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Cutting the slots in a guitar’s neck for the frets requires special tooling, and [Gord]’s contribution to his friend’s recent dive into lutherie was this lovingly engineered and crafted fret mitering jig. We’d love to have a friend like [Gord].

We’ve covered a number of [Gord]’s builds before, and craftsmanship is the first thing that comes to mind whether the project is a man-cave clock or artisanal soaps. For this build, he stepped up the quality a notch – after all, if you’re going to build something you could buy for less than $200, you might as well make it a thing to behold.

There’s plenty to feast the eyes on here – an oak bed with custom logo, the aluminum jig body with brass accents, and the precision bearings that guide the pricey backsaw. Functionality abounds too – everything is adjustable, from the depth of cut to the width of the saw blade. There’s even a place to store the adjustment tool.

The result? Well, let’s just say that [Gord] and his friend [Fabrizio] are kindred spirits in the craftsmanship department. And [Fab]’s not a bad axeman either, as the video below shows.

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Gitaar Van Schroot – The Scrap Metal Guitar

December 8, 2015 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Sheet metal. Beer cans. Pieces of chain. Not items you’ll typically find on the BOM for a custom guitar. But nobody told [Maarten van Halderen] that, and so he threw them all together into a gitaar van schroot, or scrap guitar for the Dutch impaired (YouTube link).

The video shows the build process, starting with plasma cutting and welding sheet steel for the body. The neck is fabricated from rectangular steel tube, with nails serving as frets. Overall it looks like a Les Paul, except for the sink strainer basket mounted in the sound hole and the crushed beer and soda cans tacked to the body for decoration. The chains are a nice touch too. And this doesn’t appear to be [Maarten]’s first attempt at scrapyard lutherie – toward the end of the video we see that the beer can axe joins a very steam-punk looking older brother. They’re both good-looking builds, and the video after the break proves they can sound pretty good too.

For a more classical take on the building of string instruments, check out this post on mandolins and violas. Or maybe you can just 3D print your next guitar?

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Router Fixture For Radiusing Guitar Fretboards

May 10, 2015 by Rich Bremer 18 Comments

Unless you’ve been up close and personal with a guitar, it’s easy to miss that the fretboard (where a guitar player presses on the strings) is not flat. There is a slight curve, the amount of which varies with the type and brand of guitar. There are even guitars with fretboards that have a compound radius that changes from one end to the other.

[Mike] is a guitar builder and needed a way to radius his own fretboards. He did what any other DIYer would, he designed and built a tool to do exactly what he needed. The fretboard radius cutting fixture consists of a new large router base that has a curved bottom. This base rests on two metal pipes and can slide both back and forth in addition to along the new base’s curve. The flat fretboard blank is secured to the fixture below the router and is slowly nibbled away at using a standard straight flute router bit. A little sanding later and [Mike] will be able to keep moving forward on his guitar builds.

DIY Thickness Sander Is Good Enough For A Guitar Shop

December 27, 2014 by Rich Bremer 27 Comments

[Pat] is a luthier and general guy that likes to build stuff. In order to get his guitars to come out the best they can, he needed a thickness sander. For those who don’t know, thickness sander is a machine that will sand off a small amount of material from the surface of a large wood panel. There are certainly commercially available thickness sanders but [Pat] thought that they were simple enough machines so he decided to give a go at making one himself.

Since [Pat] already had access to a pretty nice wood shop, it only made sense to build the thickness sander primarily out of wood. The frame is made from standard 2×4’s. The drum is made from many disks of MDF mounted on a shaft and spun by an AC motor. You might imagine that a bunch of MDF disks mounted on a shaft would not result in a very cylindrical shape and that is exactly what happened here. So before applying the sand paper to the drum, course sandpaper was applied to a sheet of plywood and used to sand the drum round. It’s a super simple technique that resulted in a true-spinning drum. Afterward, velcro is attached to the drum and velcro-backed sandpaper is wrapped around the drum. This allows quick and effortless changing of sand paper.