The guitar's main componants came from an old Kay acoustic guitar that was nearly dead.

The Kay had a bolt-on neck that I originally thought I could just screw to the mailbox. After some trial and error, I found that I also needed to cut out the entire neck block (as seen in the picture above).



What made the Kay acoustic a perfect candidate for this build was the floating bridge and trapeze tailpiece. (A standard acoustic guitar has a bridge that is glued to the top and wouldn't have worked on this project.) These features meant that I could just add them to the mailbox "body" and, with sufficient bracing, had a working guitar.



Here are the next steps in the process:



1. I used a Dremel rotary tool with a cutoff bit to cut a rectangle "neck pocket" into the top of the mailbox. Because I used the entire neck block from the Kay guitar which was wider than the top of the neck, I was able to connect the top of the mailbox with the 'wings' of the internal neck block.



2. I used the Dremel cutoff wheel to carve a big X where the sound hole would be. I then bent back each section of the X to reveal a square sound hole that contained no sharp edges.



3. As mentioned above, I used sheet metal screws to hold the internal bridge bracing. This left the screw heads exposed right where the floating bridge would go. I had to use my Dremel routing bit to remove a little wood from the bottom of the floating bridge to get around the screw heads.