Three years ago, creator Burls Art released a video documenting the construction of his first guitar, which featured a body made from 1,200 colored pencils. The video went viral and more awesome builds followed. Today, the artist has teamed up with 4ocean to make a double cut from recycled marine plastic.

The first build video has so far amassed over 33 million views on YouTube and marked the start of a maker’s journey that has seen materials like rock salt, paper, carbon fiber, grit coffee, skateboards and Lego join the epoxy to form an impressive catalog of stunning unique constructions. There’s even a stunning infinity mirror guitar.

Burls Art is continually striving to improve its skills and find new ways to create eye candy, and the latest creation has proven to be quite the challenge.

Since 2017, Florida-based 4ocean has been on a mission to collect plastic waste from the oceans, rivers and coasts and use it to make wristbands, while selling other merchandise and products to help fund operations. cleaning in the United States and beyond. Since this month, some 20 million pounds of marine litter has been recovered.

While most of these were pulled by 4ocean employees, last year the company partnered with Polaru Marine to develop and test the BeBot, a solar/battery-powered remote-controlled robot designed to clean up trash. up to 3,000 sq ft (32,000 sq ft). ft) of coast every hour.

For the construction of the guitar, Burls Art joined a team from South Florida to dive for plastic waste in the oceans. The transport was transported to the 4ocean facility to be weighed, sorted and processed. After picking up bags of shredded high-density polyethylene and plastics such as bottles, corks, forks, etc., he returned to his workshop and got to work.

The plastic pieces were poured into a lined steel box and placed in a specially purchased household oven and baked at 350°C to melt and fuse. The hardened block was then cut into a dual horn body pattern, routed for the pickups and pots, and shaped before being polished.

A clear epoxy neck with plastic scraps inside was attempted, but unfortunately failed at the fret pressing stage. So Burls Art went back to the drawing board and opted for a maple neck with an epoxy fingerboard inlaid with plastic straws. The top of the doll is also epoxy, with a few bottle caps thrown in and topped with logos.

The finished beauty has two pickups, chrome hardware, and three control knobs for volume and tone. The bolt-on neck doesn’t have a truss rod, which is a bit dodgy, but Burls Art hopes the epoxy fingerboard will be enough to keep things straight and true. It also plays, as you can see towards the end of the build video below. And in a cool twist, much of the plastic waste from the construction project itself was salvaged for use in a future project.

Source: Burls Art