ShonKy Competition winner. The Rubbachickatar. Rubber chicken tenor guitar.

Back in July I held a competition where the entrants had to design a guitar and I would build the winner. I only had 13 entries which was a little disappointing.  I wittled them down to the 5 I thought where the most original and buildable within my budget then put them to a public vote on facebook.
The winner was John McInnes From Glasgow who designed a tenor guitar in the shape of a rubber chicken.
Here is his design.

Laugh though you may It did throw up some challenges in the build. When I started to draw it out I realised the original design was a little out scale wise for a tenor, (More in keeping with a Uke) If I had kept to the relative dimensions it would have been huge so I had to really re-design the shape to keep it a manageable size, even then the shape was quite a handful as I didn't have luxury of a nice template. I made up a rough one out of some old plastic advertising board but it wasn't really firm enough to do a good job especially around the feet. It was good enough though.  I also splayed the legs a little more to get a more flying V effect and I think it makes for a more comedic posture.
Size wise It's not much shorter than a standard electric. The neck is a little long maybe I think it will look like it's been stretched rather amusingly when  played.

I made it a neck through construction out of some Sapele with a maple fret board
Another challenge was the headstock which is the chickens head how the hell do I get that looking like a chicken head whilst the same time incorporating the machine heads? I decided to construct a cover plate that would sit above the machine heads. It had to be the right shape and cover them completely with the machine heads still being functional. Although you can tune the guitar freely with the head plate It would have to be removed it to re-string but it is only attached by three screws.

I placed the jack socket on the rear. Although that may seem silly it doesn't come any where near the players body. I didn't want to put it on the front for aesthetic reasons The natural place would have been between the legs but there really wasn't enough room with the string retainer plate being there.

Anyone who is familiar with my work will know I don't really do painted finishes. If I do they are very thin translucent finishes so a solid colour finish is a new thing. This is where I ran into a bit of trouble as I decided to do a hand painted finish firstly which turned out terrible. So I stripped it all off and got the spray cans out which ended out to be much nicer although not perfect
John is right handed so I moved the controls to the lower side. I also went for green chicken head knobs to match the green painted fret markers. .

The pickup is a nice little 4 pole cigar box guitar pickup that John kindly supplied.
So It's all built and strung up how does it play and sound? Actually it's quite nice to play the body has a natural knee rest and is nicely balanced. I have left the fitting of strap pins if required up to John. The neck is a quite chunky C profile so sits in the hand nicely. John is mainly a slide player so it it has been tuned up to open D with a fairly high action. The Little pickup delivers a really pleasing tone Nice and crisp on a clean setting with a tight overdriven tone with gain.
It has now flown the coup and on it's way north of the border. I have been informed that it will be maing it's performance debut on the 13th of December at Savifest at the the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow. With Johns band Colonel Mustard and the Dijon 5.
I'm pretty happy with it I only wish that I had better painting equipment alas space and money don't allow me this luxury.

A Cigar box tenor Ukuele and an electric solid body steel string tenor ukulele.

The latest offerings are these Tenor Ukuleles.
Pretty much completely handcrafted. Particularly pleased with the Cigar box Uke's neck.
The electric uke has a slightly odd shape as it was made up on the fly. Freestyle!
Both are available from my Website

 

Buzz's Suitcase Bass

Last year I bumped into a friend I hadn't seen for several years and we got chatting. turns out he has been making guitars out of scrap and cigar boxes etc he was equally surprised when I told him I do it for a living.
He popped around the other day with his latest creation.  a suitcase bass. and pretty cool it is too.

 

And the Winner is

The recent ShonKy competition has now closed.
The guitar I will be building is the Rubbachickitatar.

I will post updates of the build so keep watching if you want to see it! :-)

Two latest cigar boxes. A tenor guitar and a 2 string fretless cigarbox guitar with a magnetic pickup

The two latest instruments from ShonKy are this 4 string tenor guitar

The box was found at a carboot sale by a friend who thought I would like it. It's fairly modern by my usual standards but as soon as I saw it I saw it had to be a tenor guitar.

I tried out a new tailpiece design on it which works a treat and looks really nice and is reasonably easy to make.

Other firsts on this one are a radiused fingerboard and stainless steel frets. to be fair you don't really notice the radius on a small fingerboard like this but the fret wire comes pre radiused! 

I also decided on the addition of a forearm rest to protect the arm from the fairly sharp edge and to bring the hand forward a bit as the bridge is fairly high.

It's been snapped up by a buyer in the Netherlands.

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The second one which at the time of writing is still available is this very diminutive 2 string.

It has a very small mahogany wills whiffs box sapele neck with a lovely smooth and flat Afromosia Board. Volume control with one of my 12 bore control knobs. The string ferrules are made from the primers in the cartridges. The pickup is 1 half of a modified pbass pickup. the plastic cut down rounded off and a wooden top added. The strings pass between the poles and it is height adjustable. Anyway it rocks. I'm tempted to make my first demo video featuring this one as it is pretty impressive how it sounds.

Pandora 6 string cigar box guitar

The latest sold. going to Germany.

Improving a cigar box guitar. .

I cut my teeth on making cigar box guitars but over the last year I've moved away from making the 3 string variety, concentrating on solid bodies and either Ukes or mandos or tenor guitars for cigar box instruments. The main reason being there are many builders out there who build 3 string cbgs and sell them for a lot less than I do.
A local chap called Kev came to me the asking if I could do some improvements for a CBG he recently bought off Ebay as he wasn't happy with it.
I said I could have a look at it mainly out of curiosity to see what another builders work was like.
The problems he had with it was it was too quiet (amplified) the frets had sharp edges.  Also the action was too low for slide. he wanted the correct gauge strings for GDG tuning and he wanted a volume an tone control fitted.
On arrival The CBG was of the basic stick through box job with the neck glued to the underside of the lid. The piezo fitted was stuck to the underside of the stick  which is why it was so quiet.

 It has brass frets which where very poorly installed into the neck with no separate fret board also the neck doesn't look particularly flat and the fret edges where protruding out about half a mm and very sharp actually scratching the skin of your hands.

The back of the neck had also been poorly finished and was quite rough on the back.

CGB's are mainly used with a slide so demand a fairly high action unfortunately this one sported a zero fret making it very easy to hit the frets at the nut end.

 The bridge was a very small wooden one with 3 diagonal frets installed. I'm not sure what the point of the diagonal frets are if it's supposed to offer some intonation as it doesn't work as the strings still hit the bridge in a straight line.

The machine head nuts where also very loose and one of the machine heads is technically on backwards.
Ok  for a CBG that cost about  £40 - £50 This is can be expected but actually this one cost the buyer Nearly £80 with postage included. My CBG's start at a little more than that for an unfretted model (The fretwork on this being failry useless anyway)  and they are of a much higher build quality. (even the ones that look rough).
It actually was quiet easy and a fairly quick job to put this right. Removing the piezo and fitting two on either side of the neck on the lid. (I couldn't remove the neck without damaging the lid otherwise I would have  and cut a recess for the lid to resonate freely. Kev also wanted a volume and tone control fitted so I installed some removed from another guitar complete with a capacitor. As you can see from the pics one of the holes went a little off as the lid is actually MDF with a wood veneer which I wasn't expecting so my drill went for a little wander. (should have used the pillar drill)

The frets where filed and wet and dried to a hand friendly finish within 10 minutes. (Brass nice and soft) I also fine sanded the back of the neck and gave it a coat of liquid beeswax so it's now nice and smooth. tightened up the machine heads fitted D'addario A,D,G string for open g (GDG) tuning.
Kev wanted the CBG for pure slide work so I took out the zero fret and made a corian nut raising the action by 3mm I also put in a hardwood bridge with a much wider span and slightly higher elevation.
All in all just over an hours work now It is a fair bit louder and eminently more playable.

P.S this post is not meant to berate anybody elses work it's my honest opinion of this particular cigar box guitar and information on how I improved upon it.


 

Win a custom built guitar by SHonKy

I have decided to have a competition. Of course it is an attempt to get ShonKy guitars a bit of publicity but hey it's a great prize
You do have to have an account on FACEBOOK and do some sharing and liking oh and you have to design the guitar too.
Closing date for entries will be the end of August. Guitar should be built by Christmas.
The details are to be found HERE.

Cigar Box Ukuleles x 2

Here is the latest Cigar box Uke.
Concert scale. Probably the nicest I have made so far. with a lovely vintage cedar box.

Available now on my Etsy store Here

One I built sometime ago for a commission but neglected to post was this lovely large boxed Uke. I actually made the box as the customer wanted it to look old and worn and split and it was a whole lot easier to purpose build one than do the aging to an existing box and of course a box that was naturally like that would be completely useless and unstable.