OskarJ.Boldt

$750.00

Tags: Amp Cabinet Abbreviated, Bluetooth Amp, Boneyard, Cantilevered, Complete Amp Cabinet, Found Object, Integrated Speaker, Original Available, Spirit Level

Categories: 24.75" scale, Six-String Guitar, Specialty, Standard Scale

It started as an attempt to build a $500 Rubÿtone for a neighbor. A violin neck, a piece of my brother’s old staircase, a cane handle found in the gutter, a duffel-bag strap, a broken shoestring and a gutted vintage radio had other ideas.

OskarJ.Boldt began as an experiment in economy:

How much of a complete Rubÿtone could be built from reclaimed materials, repurposed objects and parts already on hand without allowing the budget to dictate the design?

Its construction combines a repurposed violin neck with a cantilevered spruce structure made from a section of my brother’s old staircase. A discarded cane handle forms the upper horn and provides strap balance, while a repurposed duffel-bag strap—with a shoestring extension—continues the found-object construction.

The onboard amplifier is a Lekato mini guitar amp installed inside the gutted enclosure of a vintage Traveller tube radio. Rather than imitating the radio’s original function, the conversion gives the enclosure an entirely new one while preserving its character as part of the instrument.

OskarJ.Boldt was supposed to prove that I could build a Rubÿtone for $500. It ended up proving something more useful: building economically and building cheaply are not the same thing. Its identity comes from finding useful relationships among objects that were never intended to belong together—and making those relationships work as a guitar.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Guitar
Approach	Experimental Build, Found-Object Build, Front Integrated-Amp Build
Construction	Cantilevered
Body	Vintage Traveller Tube Radio
Beam	Pine Carpenter Level
Neck	Mahogany
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Standard Guitar Headstock
Scale Length	24.75"
Number of Frets	17
Bridge	Archtop Mandolin Bridge
Tailpiece	Eminee Tiger Toy Guitar
Neck Pickup	DeArmond Tone Boss Sound Hole Pickup
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup
Pickup Switch
Controls	1 Volume / 1 Tone
Knobs	Guitar Pedal Knobs
Amplifier	Lekato Mini Amp
Power Supply	USB-C (Internal Rechargeable Battery)

OskarJ.Boldt

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

8.31 / 10

299 / 360 points

playing

Fun to Play

The first test is whether the guitar makes you want to keep playing it. A high score means the instrument feels inviting, responsive, and rewarding rather than merely interesting to look at. The best examples have enough soul that you forget you are evaluating them and simply keep going.

Playability

Measures how naturally the instrument responds to ordinary playing technique across the neck. Action, fretwork, neck feel, access, and setup should work together without asking the player to compensate for the design. A strong score means the unusual construction never becomes an excuse for compromised playing.

Ergonomics

Considers how comfortably the instrument sits against the body, hangs from a strap, and positions the hands. Weight distribution matters as much as total weight, especially when found objects or onboard amplification shift the center of gravity. The most artful solutions make an unconventional shape feel surprisingly natural.

Tone Quality

Judges the character, clarity, richness, and usefulness of the instrument’s core sound. The goal is not one supposedly perfect tone, but a voice with musical identity and enough detail to reward attentive playing. The highest scores go to guitars whose sound has real soul rather than merely acceptable frequency response.

Tonal Versatility

Measures how many genuinely useful sounds the instrument can produce rather than simply counting switches and settings. Different pickup combinations and controls should create musically distinct choices that a player would actually use. A clever circuit scores higher when its versatility feels purposeful instead of complicated for its own sake.

Amplification

Evaluates how convincingly the guitar performs through its intended amplification system, whether external or built in. Output, clarity, noise, feedback behavior, and usable volume all matter. For self-amplified Rubÿtones, a high score means the amplifier feels integrated into the instrument rather than attached as an afterthought.

build

Fit & Finish

Evaluates the precision and care visible in joints, edges, fretwork, hardware installation, surfaces, wiring, and final setup. Handmade character is welcome; carelessness is not the same thing as character. A strong score shows experienced workmanship while allowing the object to retain the marks and soul of its previous life.

Portability

Measures whether the instrument’s mass and dimensions make sense for the way it is meant to be used. A guitar with an onboard amp may reasonably weigh more, but every added ounce should earn its place. High scores reward designs that are easy to carry, hold, busk with, or live with without sacrificing the idea.

Reliability

Rates the likelihood that the guitar will keep working properly through normal playing, transport, and repeated use. Structural joints, wiring, controls, hardware, and power systems should feel dependable rather than experimental in the risky sense. A high score means the wit of the design is backed by experienced engineering.

Repairability

Considers how sensibly the instrument can be serviced when something eventually wears out or fails. Standard parts, accessible wiring, replaceable components, and understandable construction all help. The strongest designs are inventive without turning a future repair into an archaeological excavation.

Solutions

Scores the quality of the solutions used when unconventional materials create unconventional problems. Beam placement, neck angle, pickup clearance, feedback, balance, and internal packaging are all opportunities to demonstrate experience. High scores go to solutions that are technically sound and artful enough to look inevitable afterward.

Integration

Measures how successfully all the unrelated parts become one coherent working instrument. Neck, beam, body, hardware, electronics, amplifier, and found objects should cooperate mechanically and visually. The best integrations have a kind of soul: the parts stop looking assembled and start looking as though they found each other.

design

Innovation

Measures whether the guitar introduces a genuinely fresh idea, solution, relationship, or way of thinking about an instrument. Novelty alone is not enough; the innovation should improve the object, deepen the concept, or open a useful new possibility.

Shouldn’t Work

Rewards designs that appear improbable but succeed because the underlying engineering is sound. The wit comes from the gap between what your eyes expect and what your hands and ears discover.

Beauty

Judges visual appeal without assuming that beauty must mean polished, conventional, or expensive. Proportion, material, color, age, texture, and restraint can all create beauty in very different ways.

Sculpture

Considers the guitar as a three-dimensional object even when nobody is playing it. Silhouette, negative space, depth, structure, and the relationship between functional parts should reward viewing from more than one angle.

Coherence

Measures whether the many materials, colors, shapes, and components read as one intentional composition. A Rubÿtone can be busy, strange, or witty without looking accidental.

Relic

Rates the visual and emotional value of genuine age, wear, patina, scars, repairs, and evidence of earlier use. Authentic history carries more weight than artificially manufactured distress.

concept

Stage Presence

Measures how strongly the instrument communicates from across a room or under performance conditions. Silhouette, scale, color, movement, and unusual construction can all contribute before a note is heard.

Stands Alone

Judges whether the instrument feels complete and compelling without requiring a long explanation of why it matters. The story may deepen the experience, but the object should already make a persuasive case visually and musically.

Material Story

Considers how much meaning comes from the history and previous purpose of the materials themselves.

Transformation

Measures how completely the original object has been given a convincing second identity without erasing where it came from.

Boneyard Score

Rates how deeply the instrument embodies the practice of building from saved, secondhand, leftover, or previously overlooked materials.

Necessity

Asks whether each major component has a reason to be there. Extra hardware, controls, decorative pieces, and technology should contribute to function, story, balance, or visual composition.

personality

Story

Measures the strength of the narrative carried by the guitar’s materials, development, accidents, people, places, and decisions.

Surprise

Rates the number and quality of discoveries the instrument offers after the first glance.

Conversation

Measures how naturally the guitar makes people curious enough to ask questions.

Cool Factor

Captures the difficult-to-measure quality that makes an instrument desirable before every reason can be itemized.

Identity

Measures how immediately the guitar feels like itself rather than a variation of something more familiar.

Rubÿtone DNA

Rates how clearly the instrument expresses the recurring ideas behind Rubÿtone: reuse, structural invention, functional sculpture, irreverence, and serious playability.

impact

Humor

Measures whether the guitar contains genuine wit rather than a joke pasted onto an otherwise ordinary object.

Punchline

Judges whether the concept resolves into a satisfying final idea—the moment when the viewer suddenly understands why a particular object, material, or decision is there.

Disdain

Measures the willingness to question inherited rules about what an electric guitar is supposed to look like, contain, or be made from.

Rules

Rates how effectively the instrument departs from established guitar-building conventions while remaining musically and structurally convincing.

Copy Potential

Considers whether the central idea could inspire a new custom build without requiring an exact duplicate of the original.

Evolution

Measures how much useful creative territory remains in the idea after this particular guitar is finished.

THE STORY

Refused to Stay on Budget

OskarJ.Boldt started with a neighbor who wanted a guitar but didn't have much money to spend. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to see whether I could build a real Rubÿtone for $500. I mocked it up on the floor several times, moving parts around and trying to make the numbers cooperate with the idea. Before long, the answer became pretty obvious. I could make a cheap guitar for $500, or I could make the guitar I was imagining. Apparently I couldn't do both.

The problem I became interested in solving was vibration. With the amplifier built into the instrument, I wanted to keep as much of its vibration as possible from traveling directly into the bridge and pickup and turning into unwanted feedback. The structure began developing around that problem. A leftover violin neck became part of the solution, along with a chunk of spruce that had been left behind when my brother replaced the spruce stair treads in his house with oak. Neither piece had been waiting around with guitar building in mind, which generally makes them more interesting candidates for a Rubÿtone.

Then it needed a top horn so the guitar would balance properly on a strap. I found that part in the gutter in front of my studio. It was the handle from somebody's walking cane. Once it was attached, it looked considerably less like something found in the gutter and considerably more like it had been waiting to become a guitar horn.

The strap continued the same line of thinking: it came from an old duffel bag and wasn't quite long enough, so a broken shoestring became the extension. There are more expensive ways to solve these problems. They aren't necessarily better stories.

The amplifier brought another unfinished experiment back into circulation. I had an old Traveller tube radio left from the period when I was trying to figure out how to build an all-tube Rubÿtone. Eventually its circuit stopped working, and repairing vintage tube radios isn't one of the skills I was trying to acquire. But the radio itself was too beautiful and too simple to discard. So I gutted it, kept the part that still had something to contribute, and retrofitted the enclosure with a Lekato mini guitar amp.

That's really where OskarJ.Boldt found its identity. It began as an exercise in economy, but economy and cheapness turned out to be two different ideas. The guitar is full of things that cost very little because they had already lived another life: a violin neck, a piece of my brother's staircase, somebody's cane handle, a duffel-bag strap, a broken shoestring and a radio whose original electronics had given up.

The artfulness is in finding relationships among those things and making them work together as an instrument.

So I failed to build the $500 Rubÿtone.

I think I built something better.