This Cardboard Guitar Is 70% Air... But It Still Plays Like A Fender - Yanko Design

"Ten years ago, Fender and Signal put out a cardboard Stratocaster that made the rounds online and promptly disappeared into the "cool but impractical" category of guitar experiments. Burls Art saw it and had a different reaction: he wanted to build his own. Not as a replica, but as a legitimate exploration of what corrugated cardboard could do as a guitar-building material."

"The concept isn't about gimmickry or standard internet clout-chasing, it's about pushing cardboard to its structural limits while keeping the guitar genuinely playable. Burls Art started with recycled corrugated cardboard sheets, laminating them with resin into blanks thick enough to shape into a body and neck. The key was saturating each piece thoroughly while letting excess resin drain through runners, leaving the corrugated channels mostly hollow. This gave him blanks that were roughly 70% air but rigid enough to route and carve like traditional tonewoods."

Recycled corrugated cardboard sheets were laminated with resin into thick blanks and excess resin was allowed to drain through runners so the corrugated channels remained mostly hollow, producing blanks roughly 70% air yet rigid enough to route and carve like traditional tonewoods. A 4.42-pound fully functional Strat-style electric guitar body was carved using a router sled with standard contours and convincing visual transparency from corrugation texture. String tension on the neck posed significant engineering challenges, with typical forces of roughly 100–150 pounds per neck depending on strings and tuning.

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