Cajon

A Cajón is a musical instrument which originated in Peru. It’s a large wooden box which you sit on and then hit the front of to make a low drum sound, or a snare sound if you put a snare in it.

Design

The only important detail is that the front face needs to be made out of thinner plywood so it can act like the skin of a drum.

Details

• 3mm birch plywood for the front face, 12mm birch plywood for all the other faces.
• Overall dimensions were \( 30 \times 30 \times 50 \) cm.
• Hole on the back face is 11cm diameter.

You can see how it all fits together in the pictures below.

I finished it with spray paint, teak oil, and some small rubber feet. There was a bit of a problem with this, in that the teak oil caused the spray paint to blur a tiny bit at the edges, but it wasn’t catastrophic.

Snare

To add a bit more breadth to the sound, I added a snare, like you’d stretch across a snare drum, via a length of wood running parallel to the front face, secured at the ends to the sides of the Cajón. If you attach it so that it touches one side of the Cajón more than the other, then you can get varying sounds through playing the snare drum in different places.

Finished Product

In all it’s glory: