Cajon Reconstruction

A while back a friend of mine and I made a couple of cajons together. These were the first cajons I had made, and they came out sounding great. However they also had a couple of problems. First, unbelievably, after all the care I took with the decoration for mine, I misspelt "Aquis"! I never botherered to even check, somehow I just thought incorrectly the word had an "S" at the end of the word....oh well, sigh...

My friend decided to leave his undecorated. He did experience some problems with the construction. The top board separated from the front sound board, I believe because his design did  not have enough screws and the combination of the weight on the top with the striking on the front was too much for the glue and the few screws on the end.

So I offered my friend the trade of my misspelled cajon for his broken one, as he did not really have the tools and space to fix his. I trimmed it up, took it apart, put it back together with extra screws and glue. Another change I made was the feet. I traded the "wooden drawer pulls" as feet, for some rubber furniture pegs. Mainly because I found that the wooden feet caused the cajon to slide across the floor a bit as it was played. Finally I added a tung and danish oil finish and a handle to help with carrying it back and forth.

It is a good sounding cajon with a lot of bass. This style of cajon is also nice as it doubles as a seat for playing congas. Finally you can toss the"instrumentos pequeños" inside of it, like your claves, campana, guagua, etc,. So the cajon is a very useful musical instrument that can also be used as a chair and a suitcase!