I built myself both a cigar box bass and a ukulele bass and have modified a Jaguar bass, so I wanted to have a bass amp. I didn't want anything too big or heavy, but wanted something powerful enough that I could play with others and I could possibly upgrade. And I didn't want to spend a lot. At first I thought I'd buy a good light neodymium 10" bass speaker and put it in a sealed guitar cab I had that was a bit deeper than usual. While it technically worked, it didn't give t

I saw on CB Gitty's site (good source for Cigar Box Guitar parts) that someone had made a guitar from a lunchbox that looked like an old portable radio. I went to eBay and sure enough, there were a few of these lunch boxes for sale. I got one to make an amplifier out of. The box only looked like at had any speaker grill in it, so I used a Dremel to carve out some slots to let the sound out. That was a real pain with some unwanted bending of the slats and a lot of scorching.

This is a Philco radio from 1949. I removed the tiny 3x5 oval speaker and extended the slits in the wood to fit in a 6" x 9" speaker to give it better sound and much more output. Rather than trying to reuse the built in tube radio which grounds itself directly to one side of the AC current (known as a "widow maker" for those in the trade), I replaced it with a 5 watt solid state amp. I made a custom chassis out of metal bent at just the right angle so could re-use the volume