This week is another fun blog; creative people making guitars out of unconventional items! Much like part one, this blog showcases some really interesting handmade creations that are very awesome and very functional guitars. Read on to see things in guitars that you never thought you would see before!

We featured Burls Art on our previous blog entry about unique guitars, and here he is again, with another colored pencil guitar. As it turns out, pencils seem like a fairly sturdy and quality material to make guitars out of if you know what you’re doing. They also have such high potential to create interesting patterns, as seen in the neck of this guitar here.

We all know that guitars are made of wood, but it isn’t common that you see someone put together a guitar made entirely out of hardware store plywood. The end result is pretty fantastic looking, too! This video is also particularly interesting because the creator goes in to great detail about guitar building; you can learn a lot about how guitars in general are built in this video.

If you were to just look at this guitar, it looks pretty standard and nothing seems out of the ordinary. But, in reality, it was made from a shelf! It takes true creativity to look at a shelf and think “this would make a great guitar”.

Here we are with Burls Art again, with yet another insanely awesome guitar build. Did you ever think coffee beans would look awesome if you put them in resin and turned them in to a guitar? Probably not, but it turns out that it actually does look pretty great. It also smells wonderful, too!

The shovel guitar is probably the most unique and surreal guitar on this list! What would you do if someone had a guitar case, pulled a shovel out of it, and started playing it?

With Valentine’s day right around the corner, it is certainly time to start thinking about what to get your loved one as a gift. Sure, you could go the boring route and get them candy, but why not get them something guitar-themed instead? Here are some Valentine’s day gifts for guitarists that are sure to make your loved one smile!

Is your musician partner constantly away from you and on tour? Then this mug set would be a great gift for them! They could bring the mug along with them on tour and leave the other at home for you to use so you will always be connected in some way.

A little keychain reminder of your love for your partner makes a very sweet gift. The pouch will keep the engraved metal pick safe, and they can pull it out any time they are thinking about you. Additionally, the pouch can be used to store extra picks so this keychain is both a kind gesture and practical!

If you are looking for a more personalized gift, this one would be an excellent choice. This little wooden pick box can be customized with any text that you’d like, along with the three wooden picks that come with it. Nothing says “I love you” as much as a personalized gift! The pick box can also hold many more picks, so it is something that can be taken on the road or to a show to use.

Here’s another great pick-themed keychain for your guitarist partner. This one is a metal pick and a small guitar charm on a key loop. While not functional as a real pick, it still makes a wonderful gift and serves as a small reminder of how much you love your partner.

Here is a bundle of gifts for a guitarist. It comes with a fun mug, some cozy socks, and a pen holder shaped like a person playing a guitar. This is a great set of gifts for the guitarist that enjoys receiving more practical things as gifts. They will surely think of you every time they use one of the items in this bundle!

Most people make electric guitars out of different types of wood. They carve the wood, and then add the electronics and an electric guitar is born. Of course, that is over-simplifying it, but you get the picture.

However, some creative people don’t want to stay inside that box. They have different ideas of what materials guitars could be made of, and they experiment with very different materials. The results of these experiments are often extremely unique and beautiful, and the process is very interesting to watch!

Here are some creators that made amazing guitars out of very unconventional materials.

Glass is, no doubt, an awesome material. It’s possible to create some really awesome looking things with it, so why not a guitar? Morningstar Glass Guitars specializes in making these guitars, and you can watch the build process in the video. Note that even the fretboard is entirely glass!

Do you need a use for all those old Legos you had when you were a kid? Here’s possibly the best use for them that you’d ever find; a Lego guitar. Imagine rocking out to some metal on a guitar made of Legos!

This guitar is my personal favorite; it’s a guitar made entirely out of popsicle sticks, but with an interesting twist; the popsicle sticks were used as “pixels”, and Cranmer Guitars used them to make a design based on a classic Nintendo video game. The whole build was quite time-consuming, but the end result is amazing.

If you liked jawbreakers as a kid (or now), you’ll absolutely love this guitar made of jawbreakers suspended inside resin. The jawbreakers give the guitar a really awesome design when cut in half!

Here’s another amazing design from Burls Art; a guitar made entirely of colored pencils. This one is particularly cool, because it looks just like a typical guitar until you get closer and see the pencils it is made up of!

Thinking outside the box is always a good thing, but it’s particularly awesome when combined with guitar construction! Which one of these unique guitars is your favorite?

Our amps, speaker cabinets, and even guitar cases are typically covered in Tolex, but what exactly is this ubiquitous material? Where did it come from, and how did it come to be used in so many guitar related applications for almost 70 years? And what does it have to do with WWII?
 
The earliest mention of the word Tolex I could find is in TESS, the US government trademark database where the trademark was first registered on Christmas Day 1945. When you think of the other things that must have been happening during that first holiday following the end of WWII, it seems a rather curious date, but there you go.
 
Tolex’s birthplace was General Tire and Rubber Company in Akron Ohio. The name moved around as General Tire diversified, changed management and acquired and divested business units over the years. The great-grandchild, if you like, of General Tire that still manufactures this type of covering is Omnova Solutions Inc, which is still based in Ohio, although earlier this year Omnova itself was acquired by UK based multi-national, Synthomer PLC.
 
The Tolex trademark appears to have lapsed in 2005 and I could not find Tolex itself listed as an Omnova product today, at least, not exactly. You can trace the family tree though to current Omnova brands Nautolex, a fabric covering for marine applications such as boat seating, and Boltaflex an indoor upholstery fabric.
 
So, what actually is, or was Tolex? I could not find any patents associated with it and it has been variously described in the trademark history as ‘coated fabrics’ or ‘plastic sheet and film material’ so it really is just an old, expired brand name for plastic upholstery material. These days, the word Tolex is used only by old guitar players that still use vacuum tubes, germanium transistors, and other such relics, long consigned to the trash can of history by younger, wiser folk.
 
Plastic upholstery, or coverings, are often designed to look like leather hence sometimes called leatherette, or faux leather. Presstoff was a faux leather made from paper pulp invented in Germany in the 19th Century and used commonly during WWII since genuine leather was rationed. Other brands such as Rexine in the UK and then Tolex in the US followed up on this idea. They were water resistant, cheaper and often more available than leather, so it made sense that they would be used in automobile upholstery and for book coverings even after the war was over.
 
Some early guitar amps from the late 1940’s and early 1950’s such as the Harmony 8418 were covered in actual leather. Leo Fenders first ‘woodie’ amps from early 1946 were hardwood, switching the use of a Tweed luggage covering material in early 1947. The first two tone leatherette covered Champions appeared in 1949. Fender describes the first use of the brand name Tolex material in 1959. Leo Fender is known today as a master of cost optimization and for making the most out of what materials were available at the time. We can see this in the move from hardwood, to tweed, to Tolex. Like so many other things in the electric guitar world, our Tolex covered amps and speakers have a direct line back to Leo Fender.
 
When we talk about Tolex today on modern products, we are no longer describing the brand name material from General Tire used on those early amps, but something similar from a variety of different manufacturers. It’s usually a fabric backing with vinyl or other plastic bonded over it, but it could be just a plain plastic material.
 
Some amps and brands are practically defined by their Tolex. When I think of an Orange TH100 or a Marshall Silver Jubilee or a piggyback Fender it’s the color of the Tolex that sticks out in my mind. Fortunately for us, there are a large number of different amp coverings available today from the vintage browns and blondes through alligator and snakeskin to even carbon fiber. None of them are actually Tolex any longer. That is, until someone decides they want to try and resurrect that dead trademark. Any takers?