We’ve seen YouTuber Burls Art create an electric guitar body out of 1,200 colored pencils, but now the purveyor of bizarre builds – he’s also done a paper-constructed electric, an epoxy resin guitar and an infinity mirror model studded with LEDs – has taken his pencil design one step further.
Behold his newest creation, a Tele-style electric with a neck – yes, a neck – constructed from colored pencils.
He begins the build by placing the pencils in a wooden frame and then covering them with, of course, epoxy.
He then butterflies the resulting neck and gets the blank planed down.
The surface, he determines, is roughly “50 percent wood, 30 percent epoxy and 20 percent lead.”
Burls Art then pours a layer of epoxy on top, which will serve, amazingly, as the fretboard.
Lastly, he attaches the neck to a Tele body – built, of course, from colored pencils – that he constructed in one of his earlier videos.
The neck, not surprisingly, is gorgeous – no inlays needed. As for why it lacks a truss rod?
One reason, Burls Art explains, “is I think the neck will be overall stronger without the cavity routed for the truss rod.”
Also “typical neck wood may have a tendency to move due to air conditions or moisture. But this neck is literally a bunch of colored pencils in epoxy. So I don’t think it’s going to move much, and it hasn’t yet.”
He continues, “I really didn’t know whether or not this would be strong enough to hold string tension, but to my surprise, over the past few years of doing colored pencil guitars they always have ended up being a lot stronger than I’ve imagined.”
As for how the, um, colorful guitar performs?
While Burls Art says it has an “absolute bat of a neck,” he also proclaims that “the playability is fine for my hands, and the epoxy fretboard also has a really nice feel to it.
"Overall, it looks sweet and it’s nice to finally have a complete colored pencil guitar.”
You can check out the build in full above.
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