Keeping a guitar properly humidified through a dry winter takes a some discipline with a regular guitar case humidifier and, even if you are disciplined, the actual humidity inside the case is not all that controllable and usually not really known. Also, some people like to display their guitars rather than have them hidden away. For those reasons, I've been working on a display case with active humidity control. Here are a couple of pictures:
The case is a wood box with a wood frame lid with shrink plastic. There is weather stripping between the lid and box sides. Humidity control is done with a controller I got of Ebay for around $20.00 attached to a 12V CPU fan that blows through a container with silica cat litter that has been soaked in water. The trickiest part of the whole arrangement was the valve set up I made on the silica container lid. It's a couple covers, one inside the box under the fan and one outside the box over the adjacent hole. The covers are connected and balanced on a fulcrum point so that when the fan turns on it blows on the inside cover and both open up. The balance between the covers is such that when the fan is not on, they close over the holes.
The first picture shows initial set-up outside my shop where the humidity in the case started at around 34%RH. In about 15 minutes the RH was up to 45% and the fan turned off. Over about the next 15 minutes the RH dropped to 40% and the fan turned back on to bring it back up. And so on. The second picture shows a little closer view of the humidity control set up. I could tighten up on the 5% spread if I wanted.
This is kind of ugly but it appears to work and it was cheap. I think my clients might like it but I'm not too interested in getting into the display case making business. Also, I think a nicer set up would be easy to obtain for not an unreasonable amount of money. For example, there are cigar humidor humidifiers such as these:
http://www.thesmokingstore.com/le-veil-icigar-12v2-electronic-cigar-humidifier/ Does anybody have an experience with one of these things? There are also display cases available from furniture stores that would hold a few guitars and cost less than what it would cost me to build. So for a few hundred dollars it seems that you could put together a humidity controlled display case that would be easy to maintain, offer good control and show off your guitars.
What do you think?
Pat
Login
Register
FAQ
