Dogbowl Resonator Guitar

It was so much fun to make this guitar. I love how the dog bowl gives the guitar a metallic tone, sounding a bit like a banjo. For the stain, I used a Japanese technique called Shou Sugi Ban, which involved charring the wood with fire (yes, fire!), then applying a thin coat of stain. The wood grain will burn at different rates and you end up with this great look. It worked better on the sides than the top and back, since those are plywood. For the neck, I made stain by putting steel wool in a jar with vinegar, then left it until it dissolved the steel wool. Different woods stain at different rates, which you can tell by looking at the neck where it meets the body.

This is the one that started this crazy hobby of mine. One day I spotted a Make Magazine article for making a cigar box guitar. I had never made anything in my life, and didn’t even own any tools. In fact, I bought my first set of power tools to make this guitar. I went to a cigar store and got this box, and for some reason had a scrap 1×2 that I used as the neck. It was simply gluing the stick to the box, the simplest way to make a guitar. The article calls for making your own tuners out of bolts, so I did that. It also has the strings made from twine, so I did that too. This wasn’t a guitar to be played, it was to be displayed. And so it stayed, for a number of years. Once I got really hooked on making instruments a few years later, I went back and added real tuners, real guitar strings and a piezo (contact mic). It is played with a slide since there are no frets on it.