If you look at guitartist (that’s a guitar artist, one who makes guitar art, btw) Burls Art YouTube channel, you will notice he does not produce many guitars. The reason is obvious: it takes an insane amount of time for an individual to custom guitars with unusual materials. His latest project, which is an electric guitar made out of 1,000 drink cans, took 3 months.
3 months was the time used to build the furnace to melt the 1,000+ aluminum cans Burls Art has collected over the past year. Anyhoo, the result, while not perfect, is absolutely stunning. As you can imagine, the recycled aluminum cans made the guitar have a bit of heft to it, coming in at 12.30 lbs (5.58 kilograms).
The custom Telecaster-style aluminum guitar looked like a guitar T-1000 would use if the killing machine from the future plays the guitar. That said, because of the shine it is a smear/fingerprint magnet. As I said, it is not perfect. The molding process left it with some pockets here and there but I think that is the beauty of this electric axe. You know. Kind of like battle damage.
As with all of Burls Art’s builds, only the body, neck, and headstock are custom. The electronics, tuning pegs, bridge saddles, and string trees are off-the-shelves components. Go ahead and have a look at the build process in the video embedded below.
Images: Instagram (@burlsart)/YouTube (Burls Art).
