Simple Guitar Amplifier

In the world of "If you know things, you can do things," I present to you a simple guitar amplifier. Use case for this project was born out of my daughter's (KK4ECV) return home from college. While she has a small amp in her barracks room, she wanted a portable version for the road. We toyed with several ideas and designs in the weeks before her return. I wanted to put everything in a small project box. But that size only accommodated a small 8 ohm project speaker. Didn't sound too impressive. Around that time I had recalled an earlier trip to Total Wine. They have a walk-in humidor...a feature of which are empty cigar boxes for take away of a handful of cigars. I grabbed several of the wood boxes for this and future projects.

The amp circuit is a simple LM386. I used film caps as they are purported to provide better audio fidelity. I don't know if that's true, but they're the only parts I bought. The rest of the bits in pieces were in my parts boxes. 

I etched the board. My daughter soldered all but the LM386. While we both wanted a smaller form factor, both of us felt that a single 32 ohm speaker I took from a garbage picked boombox sounded the best. We opted to forgo a variable pot as the only one in the parts bin was not sufficiently linear.