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 kid's Christmas list. Most of us never got very good at drawing pictures on it (some did, see here), but we had a lot of fun moving the vertical and horizontal knobs and making boxy looking pictures.

Here's how you can build your own 3 string cigar box style guitar from an Etch A Sketch. If you've never built a cigar box guitar before, I recommend you start with a kit that uses a wooden box like the ones CB Gitty or MGB Guitars sell, as the Etch A Sketch makes this project quite a bit more difficult.

1. Buy one of the many vintage Etch A Sketches from eBay

2. Follow instructions online to disassemble an Etch A Sketch (example here). You'll find these videos are for people that want to preserve a great picture they've actually drawn, but that would get all messed up when you slide the neck into the Etch A Sketch. I followed those instructions to disassemble the Etch A Sketch, but then cheated and took a regular picture and edited it in Photoshop to make it look like an Etch A Sketch picture (see instructions here) and then taped it on the bottom of the glass.

3. Use basic cigar box guitar building techniques to add a neck, tuning pegs, tailpiece and bridge to it (and if you want to electrify it, a pickup and a 1/4" phono jack). Some suggestions for parts:

   1. A 23" neck is a good scale to use, like this one I used from CB Gitty. I always round off the corners with a rasp and sandpaper to make it a D cross section so it's smoother to play .

   2. Gray stain helped make the neck match the screen much better.

   3. Use gold and/or brass tuners and tailpiece (you can also get those on CB Gitty and MGB Guitars). You will also want to get brass box corners to hold the thing together. I didn't try to glue it back together as I wanted to see how the neck angle was before doing something permanent. Regular cigar box corners don't really work as the screw holes aren't far enough from the bottom to bite into the plastic top. I used these.

   4. If you add a pickup, you won't really be able to surface mount it as you'll most certainly crack the glass. I added a "ghost pickup" to mine where the pickup actually sits under the glass in a notch made into the neck. Note that your typical 1/4" guitar jack has got too big of a diameter to fit into the Etch A Sketch casing. I used a long gold barrel jack. Note that the Etch A Sketch knobs are mounted on spindles that are much smaller in diameter than the typical 1/4" or 6mm guitar knobs. So I did not add volume or tone potentiometers and wired the pickup directly into the output jack and kept the original knobs for looks only. Don't throw away the original spindles for the knobs like I did or you'll be cutting up swizzle sticks to re-attach the knobs.

   5. The toughest thing on this was there was not quite enough room inside the Etch A Sketch for the neck. The size may vary a bit depending on which year your Etch A Sketch was made. I had to remove some of the wood from the bottom of the neck for the part that will be inside the Etch A Sketch. Probably less than 1/8" of removal with a plane or rasp is enough. Remove a bit then test, then remove more if necessary.

   6. The other tricky part is that once you string it up and the pressure mounts, the box corners aren't really enough to hold it nice and tight so you get the desired low action on the neck. It's plastic and it will start bulging in the middle of each of the 4 sides. I added additional braces, specifically these (they come with nails but use small brass screws like the ones that come with guitar tuners). Trim the little tip off the ends of the braces as they're about 1/16" too long. Add one brace on each side of the tailpiece, one on each side of the neck and one on each of the other sides. Add a pretty short bridge like these and you should be all set with good action.