The $75 Guitar Challenge

by Doug Hunt and Mark French

Originally published in American Lutherie #142, 2021



Mark: A couple years ago, I was walking around a big home store and started to wonder whether it would be possible to build a guitar only from things I could buy there. Obviously, they didn’t sell tuners, fretwire, or truss rods. However, I thought it might be possible if one had those three things. I decided that, given those parts, it might be possible to make a guitar with $75 to spend at the home store. Thinking it might be an interesting challenge, I suggested the idea to Doug Hunt. Doug and I have been guitar-making friends for years, having met as part of a project aiming to teach technical subjects to high school students through guitar making. (Check it out at guitarbuilding.org.) He was interested, though not looking for one more thing to do at the time.

A while later, he suggested that a better idea would be to start with a budget of $75 that could be spent anywhere (he’s a big fan of eBay, as it happens). As long as the money could be spent anywhere, he thought that it might be possible to do the whole instrument for $75. Over some months of occasionally revisiting the idea, we did a little negotiating and settled on the following rules: