A Headlining Guitar Built Out of 700 Newspaper Pages

Burl, the incredibly creative luthier and craftsman of Burl’s Art, built a headlining Fender Jazzmaster-style electric guitar out of a stack of 700 pages of newspaper print that he got from his local news company. Plus a lot of epoxy.

I take a bunch of newspaper and attempt to build a guitar out of it.

He stacked and glued the print, cut it to size, formed the body, and added the neck and pickups. The stacked newsprint gave the guitar a neat wood-like finish and a beautiful grayish-brown hue. He ran into a few hiccups with the design, but after working through them, Burl wound up with a unique guitar with a rich, bluesy sound. According to Burl, this build was the most time-consuming.

I spent about 15 to 20 hours of my life just gluing newspaper together around 700 sheets of newspaper in total this was easily my most time intensive build to date and a lot of that time was just getting to the point where I have enough material to build a guitar.

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.

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