Stomp Box

Materials You Will Need.

You will need just 4 items for this project:

  1. Small wooden cigar box.
  2. Piezo transducer
  3. Guitar input jack
  4. Duct tape or any self-adhesive tape

 

Cigar Box

Important! It HAS to be made from the wood. Not cardboard as you will be playing it by tapping with your foot.
Otherwise you break it very easy.

Small Cigar Box Cohiba

I’ve got it for $3 in the local tobacco store – the main source for the cigar box guitars.
Don’t give up if you can not find the right cigar box or even the tobacco store itself! Any small box can do the job.
Once I was using the cover and the bottom of the tea box. Take it as an idea.

 

Piezo Transducer

Both these items can be easily found in many electrical store like Radio Shack.

Usually you cannot find it as just a transducer. They sell it as a “piezo buzzer” or something like that.
The price range is between $5 – $10.
And it looks like a small plastic round box:

Use a knife or any other sharp tool to carefully open it.
Then you’ll be able to take out some wired object like this one:
Piezo Transducer

Guitar Input Jack

Honestly I don’t know why I call it “Guitar” Input Jack. It’s just a 1/4″ Input Jack for the price of about $3.
And it can be for anything what has the 1/4″ male contact.
Anyway. It looks like that:
Guitar input jack

Work

    1. Drill a 1/4″ hole in the side of athe cigar box and mount the input jack in it.
    2. Solder the black wire of the transducer to the outer contact of the input jack and the red wire to the inner one. Tip: sand the input jack contacts with a sand paper first to ease the soldering.
    3. Mount the transducer on the bottom of the box with thin stripes of the duct tape. I prefer the self-adhesive white band for that.
      Here’s what I’ve got as a result:
      wiring

      Same thing from the top:
      wiring view from top

    4. Fill the empty space with the foam from any packaging pieces. Cut out the foam where it facese the connectionto the input jck.
      foam filler
      Inside the box:
      fill box with foam
    5. Tighten the box with the duct tape to avoid squeaking.
      My foam was even thicker than the inner height of the box.
      Which is good but it pushes the lid up and so make it movable and squeaking during the playing.
      stomp box squeaking
      This needs to be fixed.

      How could we survive without the duct tape in the world?
      readi stomp box.
      Voila! The Cohiba Stomp Box is ready.

      Come back later to watch the video demo!

 

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