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Stomp Box with Piezo Transducer

Materials You Will Need. You will need just 4 items for this project:

Small Cigar Box Cohiba
  • Small wooden cigar box.
  • Piezo transducer
  • Guitar input jack
  • Duct tape or any self-adhesive tape

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

Both these items can be easily found in many electrical stores 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 objects 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 that 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 the 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 sandpaper first to ease the soldering.
  3. Mount the transducer on the bottom of the box with thin stripes of duct tape. I prefer the self-adhesive white band for that. Here’s what I’ve got as a result: wiringSame 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 faces the connection to the input jck. foam filler Inside the box: fill box with foam
  5. Tighten the box with duct tape to avoid squeaking. My foam was even thicker than the inner height of the box. This is good but it pushes the lid up and so makes it movable and squeaking during the playing. stomp box squeaking This needs to be fixed. How could we survive without duct tape in the world? readi stomp box. Voila! The Cohiba Stomp Box is ready.