TigerNux

$1,295.00

Tags: #StayHome Collection, Bluetooth Amp, Boneyard, Cantilevered, Complete Amp Cabinet, Copy Available, Found Object, Original Available, Reclaimed Instrument, Self-Standing

Categories: 25.5" scale, Hollow-Body, Pro, Six-String Guitar, Standard Scale

It started life as an Eminee plastic toy guitar. Then it got a real neck, Jazzmaster pickups, a Fender bridge and a NUX Mighty Lite amp. Nobody told it that it was supposed to remain a toy.

TigerNux combines a vintage 1965 Eminee Tiger plastic guitar body with a cantilevered structural beam designed to carry the working components independently of the original toy body.

The Tiger shell remains visually dominant, while the cantilevered structure supports the neck, bridge and string tension. A pair of Jazzmaster pickups is combined with a Fender-style hardtail bridge, and a NUX Mighty Lite is integrated into the body.

The original molded shape, proportions and details of the Eminee Tiger remain clearly visible. Rather than disguising the source material, the new structure allows the plastic body to remain the visual center of a full electric guitar.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Guitar
Approach	Boneyard Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, Whole Integrated-Amp Build
Construction	Cantilevered, Hollow-Body
Body	Eminee plastic toy guitar
Beam	Futon Frame
Neck	Mahogany
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Standard Guitar Headstock
Scale Length	25.5"
Number of Frets	22
Bridge	Fender Top-Loader Hardtail
Tailpiece
Neck Pickup	Fender Jazzmaster Pickup
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup	Fender Jazzmaster Pickup
Pickup Switch	3-Way Toggle
Controls	1 Volume / 1 Tone
Knobs	Top Hat Knobs
Amplifier	NUX Mighty Lite
Power Supply	9V Rechargeable Battery

TigerNux

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.72 / 10

350 / 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

This Time, I Knew better...

TigerNux didn't begin with the question of whether I could make a real guitar out of a plastic Eminee Tiger. I had already answered that.

TigerOne was the first. It established that one of these 1965 plastic toy-guitar bodies could become the basis for a serious Rubÿtone. The problem was that the original Tiger body had never been designed to deal with the structure, string tension and other demands I was placing on it.

By the time I built Stanley Tiger, I understood that problem better. I improved the internal bracing and found a better way to support the plastic body. It was progress, but I was still essentially reinforcing the Tiger so it could tolerate what I was asking it to do.

The real breakthrough came with The Black One.

Start Asking the Body to Do the Work

The Black One didn't begin as a cantilevered guitar. I came up with that solution while I was already building it. And the design drasticly eliminated the unwanted feedback by.

That changed the problem completely.

Instead of figuring out better ways to reinforce a body that was never intended to carry guitar structure, I could let a separate structure do the work. The beam could establish the neck and bridge geometry and carry the string tension. The donor

The donor body could become the enclosure, the shape and the visual identity of the guitar without being responsible for holding everything together.

It worked well enough that I knew I wanted to do it again.

That's where TigerNux enters the story.

TigerNux was the first one I started with the cantilever already in my head. I wasn't reinforcing an old solution or discovering a new one halfway through the build. For the first time, I could design the guitar around the idea from the beginning.

That distinction matters to me.

Back to the Tiger

Going back to an Eminee Tiger body gave me a chance to see what the earlier Tiger experiments looked like after the cantilever breakthrough.

The plastic shell could now simply be a Tiger. The structural beam could take care of being a guitar.

A pair of Jazzmaster pickups gave me the electric voice I wanted, with a Fender hardtail bridge handling the strings. A NUX Mighty Lite fit into the body without changing the fact that, when you look at the finished instrument, you're still unmistakably looking at an old Eminee Tiger.

I didn't want to disguise that. The plastic body is the reason the guitar exists in the first place.

Looking back, I can see a pretty clear progression. TigerOne proved the body was worth using. Stanley Tiger improved the way I supported it. The Black One gave me the cantilever. TigerNux was the first chance I had to put those lessons together before I started building.

That's why TigerNux matters in the progression.

It isn't the first Tiger, and it isn't where I discovered the cantilever.

And it's certainly not the first time a discovery became the plan.