

My Tribute to Jerry Garcia's "Tiger" guitar
The guitar that Jerry used most frequently over the last 16 years of his life was a custom guitar built by Doug Irwin called "Tiger."...


Etch A Sketch Guitar
What's more nostalgic than an Etch A Sketch ? Invented in France and marketed in the US starting in 1960, it was on every baby boomer...


The ultimate Smokey Amp experience
I previously wrote about building a cigarette pack-sized amplifier . The inspiration for the one I built came from something called the Smokey amp which was conceived in the 1980s by Bruce Zinky. The original amp came in a couple of different styles. One was in a plastic case and the other was in an actual recycled cigarette pack. So the original Zinky amp looked cool and it could fit in your shirt pocket. It had no volume or tone control and had a couple of other problems. T


Turning a Monoprice amp into a Fender Tweed
Monoprice makes a great 15 watt tube amp, but it has this ugly mashed potato colored Tolex covering on it it which I couldn't stand...


Lucky Strike Cigarette Pack Amp
I've been making a lot of mini amps lately and was wondering how small I could go. Like maybe a size that would fit in a shirt pocket...


Acoustasonic Tribute
Fender makes a wonderful model called the Acoustasonic that gives you the sound of an acoustic guitar with the light weight, smaller size...


Bicentennial License Plate Tenor Banjo
Back during the 1976 bicentennial, Michigan issued this beautiful license plate with the stars and stripes. I was going to school at...


Lightweight bass amp
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...


Retro Radio Amp
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...


Philco Radio Amp
This is a Philco radio from 1949. These were known as "farm radios" as they had not only an AC power cord but also a complex 90 volt battery pack for farms that were beyond the reach of the electrical grid back in the 1930s when these were first introduced. 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 dire