Last year I did a cigar box guitar project with my son and I’ve been building them ever since for my family and friends. After building my latest cigar box guitar for a friend I decided to put a pickup in it, but I had no way of testing if it was working right or not.

I looked at small practice amps on the internet but they are anywhere from £30 to £100, so I looked at the homemade amp scene and came across the Noisy Cricket amp from Beavis Audio. This little amp can be battery operated and uses readily available electronics; it pumps out around ½ a watt of sound and can be plugged into a speaker cabinet for a bigger sound.

I got a list of parts of the Beavis Audio website and took a trip to my local Maplins and low and behold found everything on the list, even the LM386 chip! The only thing I didn’t buy was a soldering iron as they didn’t have any cheap models in.

I ordered a soldering iron kit off Amazon and it arrived today so I think I’ll build the amp this weekend. All in all, the parts (enough to make two amps) and the soldering iron cost me just over £25.

Hope I can remember how to solder (think I’ll be looking up videos on YouTube tonight).