I bought myself an acoustic guitar for an early birthday present. In an odd coincidence, I just found out that a couple of my oldest friends just started playing within the last few months as well. It must be part of a ⅓-life crisis or something. Anyway, I’m afraid that if I store it in a hard-shell case, it’ll become a pain to get out and put back up. So I decided to make a little stand to keep the guitar conveniently at hand.
This DIY guitar stand is nothing special, but I thought I’d blog it in case someone else wants to copy my design. Like my toolbox, it’s made entirely out of wood scraps and used hardware. I basically made a large version of a picture frame stand. I used a jigsaw to cut out the feet and glued them to the back pieces. Once the glue dried, I tied the pieces together with some thin-head screws.
I used an old hinge to lock the two pieces together and cut a spare paint paddle to serve as the locking mechanism. This way, the stand will collapse and lay flat if I need to put it up or travel with it.
If there’s a benefit to being married to a woman who has plastic bins filled with fabric tucked away everywhere, it’s that I was able to cut some black velvet to pad the areas of the stand that will touch the guitar.
Here’s how it turned out. If no one’s coming over to our tiny house, I’m just going to leave this thing in the den. I figure the only way I’ll get good at it is by playing when I’m watching TV anyway, so I might as well just leave it there.
While the velvet looked great, it didn’t grip the guitar as tightly as I’d like. I had to set it exactly upright or else gravity would slowly pull the neck to one side. I went out to the garage and opened my old bicycle toolbox for the first time in a few years. I did a stint as a bike mechanic back in my college days. I used to wrap strips of tire tube rubber around my mountain bike frame to protect the paint job from the chain during stressful riding. I cut some new strips out of an old tube and used carpet tacks to adhere them to the guitar stand where the velvet had been.
Now when I set the guitar in the stand, it’s secure and the finish is protected.
Update
My brother-in-law recently started playing classical. He bought a used guitar from a friend and asked me to make him a stand for Christmas. I applied the lessons learned above and decided that the best way to ensure a stand would fit any guitar was to build one that has three basic points of contact. This is how it came out.
You just set the bottom of the guitar onto the two rubber pads and lean the neck back into the cradle. It’s not collapsible like the one above, but it’s more attractive and grips the guitar a little more cleanly. More here.
I’ve gotten emails from people asking what rubber pads I used and whether they adhered properly to the wood. I used the basic ones below. Instead of simply relying on the glue to stick to the wood, I hammered small finishing nails into the pads. I used a tap to get them halfway through the plastic so that the metal won’t ever touch—and scratch— the guitar.
