A Cajon is a common instrument in South America. It is often related to flamenco music/ samba.But you can use it just as a real drum with a guitar for accompany. When you play the cajon, you are sitting on it an drumming with your hands on the front side of the drum. You can find out a whole technics and learning stuff if you just search on cajon drumming on youtube for example.

In this instructable I will tell you how I builded my Cajon!

Step 1: The Construction

I looked up a whole bunch of sites on how to build cajons on google. There were plenty of people who had nice instructions on how they builded there cajons. But i decided to create one from a construction i found on Orcana Artesania* . It was an easy instruction except it was in Spanish but I did only use the measurements. Instead of having guitar strings in it I bought a snare drum wire that i put in it.

*Link : http://www.ocanartesania.com/

This is the parts of the box and the measurements: (see the PDF file)

construccion-aleman.pdf
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Step 2: Building the Drum

The building of the drum box was quite easy. I used plywood as material. For the frontside I used a thinner type of plywood like 3 mm thick. Then i cutted out the parts. I used a circle saw. For the hole I first drilled a small hole then I used a jigsaw to cut out the larger hole. When I had all the parts I used screws/nails and glue to put all the parts together except the front side. The front side i used smaller screws and no glue. The thing is that if you use screws it is useful for tension of the drum surface. Before I screw the frontside I fixed the snare drum wire inside it. It was the trickiest part. I had an idea that I stole from another building site I found. I had two thin iron boards that held the plastic tape of the snare wire. Then i had one screw in the middle of the two boards that I drilled a hole for to the outside of the drum*. When it was done I put the frontside in its place.

*See picture